Title: A Semantic Web service-oriented application for mobility impaired users

Authors: Dionysios D. Kehagias, Dimitrios Tzovaras

Addresses: Informatics and Telematics Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 6th Km Charilaou-Thermi Rd., GR-57001, Thermi, Thessaloniki, Greece. ' Informatics and Telematics Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 6th Km Charilaou-Thermi Rd., GR-57001, Thermi, Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract: This paper presents a service-oriented application whose purpose is to assist various activities of mobility impaired people as they move from one location to another. Such activities include trip planning, route guidance, e-working, e-learning, search for points of interest and social events among others. A number of registered web services provide all the required content and information that are displayed on the end-user device. Existing services are marked up by a number of domain ontologies about the information needs of mobility impaired users, in order to enable ontology-based search and retrieval of services. A service alignment tool has been developed to facilitate the markup process on behalf of service providers. After describing the architecture of the overall application and the involved mechanisms, we demonstrate a number of use cases that are enabled by the presented technologies.

Keywords: web services; ubiquitous computing; ontologies; mobility impaired users; mobility impairment; service retrieval; trip planning; route guidance; e-working; e-learning; electronic learning; online learning; social events; service alignment.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSHC.2009.031004

International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing, 2009 Vol.1 No.2, pp.149 - 162

Published online: 17 Jan 2010 *

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