An Ambient Service Model for Providing Structured Web Information Based on User-Contexts

Users often visit many stores while they compare merchandise in order to purchase the merchandise or merchandise related to it. Given a service providing information such as location of these stores, they can reduce their time and effort spent by wandering around them because they can go straight to these stores. And they can obtain new purchase opportunities because they can know what kinds of related stores are around them. Thus, they can do efficient purchasing activities. In this paper, we discuss service providing information of related stores efficiently in order to support users' efficient purchasing activities. And we propose an ambient service model that consists of three layers: structured (purchase-related) information space, real-life space, and ambient information space. In this model, a lot of store information collected from the web is grouped and structured automatically by relation in terms of purchasing. And users search information of related stores by using an ambient query that is automatically created by their context in real-life space. Finally, they obtain information of related stores in the form of hierarchy structure through map interface. Then, they can search other kinds of information of related stores additionally by using the hierarchy structure. We implemented a system based on this model by using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), map-based, location-based and ontology technology. The implemented system was performed in specific shopping region (Ilsan Lapesta shopping mall, Goyang-city Gyeonggi-do, Korea). And we confirmed that users can efficiently obtain information of related stores through the system. We expect that this model can be used for developing services that provide information of objects related to various objects besides stores.