Today’s nomadic users demand access to relevant information services from a variety of devices (both personal and situated/public), whenever and wherever they need them. Examples of applications for mobile guides include: mobile tourism services, museum/exhibition guides, and navigation assistants for business use (e.g. by utility companies to help locate assets in the field) or leisure use (e.g. by games on treasure-hunts or to support spontaneous social gatherings). Although the latest mobile devices and information services offer new and enhanced ways to support nomadic users while on tour, they also raise challenges concerning interaction modalities, usability, accessibility and trustworthiness.

Topics relevant for this workshop are, for instance,

• Access to tourist support, e-content and e-business via mobile devices
• Techniques to facilitate access to heterogeneous, distributed services
• Navigation support and visualization of the spatial environment
• Accessibility of mobile guides
• Context awareness, location awareness and social awareness
• Social navigation through anonymous recommendations etc.
• Personalization of services
• User validation of mobile guides
• Novel infrastructures, such as agent-based technology
• Fault tolerance, trustworthiness, and security
• Information retrieval and display whilst faced with changing infrastructure conditions

This workshop aims to bring together experts who develop or evaluate mobile guides and wish to share and discuss their experiences in this workshop. Aspects of human-computer interaction are to be addressed explicitly, empirical studies are especially welcome.

Authors are asked to send a paper (max. 6 pages) for review. Accepted papers are to be presented on the workshop. These papers will be published online.

The workshop is open to a limited number of 30 participants, including those who present their paper, to allow a focussed discussion of issues and ideas.

Please note that participants need to register for the whole MobileHCI’03 conference. For registration details and fee see http://hcilab.uniud.it/mobilehci/registration.html.

Deadlines and format

30 May 2003 Extended to 13 June : Deadline for submission of papers for workshop presentation, length 4-6 pages A4, formatted according to the ACM SIG style. You can download templates and instructions from http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Submission should be in PDF format (preferably) or Microsoft Word (any version, no macros), to be sent as email attachment to <Barbara.Schmidt-Belz@fit.fraunhofer.de>. The submitter of this email will be considered the corresponding author, whom we assume to act on behalf of and authorized by her or his co-authors.

5 July 2003 Notification to authors.

20 July 2003 Final version of accepted papers for online publication due. Authors should take into account the recommendations of reviewers. Final paper max. 6 pages in PDF format, to be sent to <Barbara.Schmidt-Belz@fit.fraunhofer.de>.

8 September 2003 Workshop (i.e. the day before MobileHCI 2003)