A Novel Concept for the Usage of Mobile Information Services

Marketplaces for mobile apps have shown a tremendous growth in the recent years leading to a variety of mobile apps/services. One type of widely applied mobile service are mobile information services, which when being enriched with context information (e.g., GPS Position) can be used to facilitate a user with information mostly tailored to his/her current activities (e.g., planning a day tour in a city unkonwn to the user). In an evolving information service market more, and more information (e.g., restaurants listed in the information service Yelp)—which we denote as information or service objects—is provided to the user. As a result, situations repeatedly occur where the user needs assistance in selecting various service objects for the activities envisaged, as being confronted with an information overload problem. This is even more relevant when considering larger sequences of activities. Here, context interdependencies, which are dependencies that exist between different activities with respect to the usefulness and feasibility of the service objects, need to be considered. Hence, in this paper, we present a novel concept for the usage of mobile information services that takes context interdependencies into account. In that way, we aim to support the decision making of the user. To show the practical benefits of this concept we developed a prototypical implementation.