Developing Tourist Guide Applications for Mobile Devices using the J2ME Platform

Many research projects have been undertaken on the use of context-aware mobile technologies for tourism that rely on the use of personal digital assistants and mobile phone devices. Many milestone projects rely on the use of a network connection and the use of GPS technologies which offer location based services. This paper presents a mobile tourism research prototype which uses web-based technologies for the creation of portable tourist applications with rich content that matches the users' profiles. The users may download these customizable applications either directly to their mobile device. Thereafter, network coverage is not further required as the applications execute in standalone mode. This prototype may be updated when the user returns online. Our prototype has been developed on the top of Java 2 Micro Edition which offers an ideal platform for the development of portable applications tailored to resource-constrained mobile devices.