ARCHIE is a research project in which the educational staff of the Gallo-Roman Museum collaborates with the Human-Computer Interaction research group of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) in the context of the expansion of the museum. The starting point of this interdisciplinary collaboration is our strong belief that handheld guides are a promising medium to enhance visitors' learning experiences in a museum and strengthen the experience of a group visit.In this paper we present a first application: a collaborative trading game for (school)groups of children; from conceptual stage towards final implementation and conclude with user test results. We designed the museum game so that every player is dependent on the concrete actions of other players; only through social interaction and cooperation can they come to a good result.

Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.

The diversity of end-user devices in combination with a growing user base poses important challenges for providing easy access to the huge amount of content and services currently available. Each device has its typical set of capabilities and characteristics that must be taken into account to create an appropriate user interface that provides interactive access to multimedia data and services. Furthermore, end-users also have their specific requirements that influence the accessibility of data and services for individual access. The approach we present in this paper is geared towards the idea of universal access to interactive multimedia data and services for everyone, independent of the user characteristics or end-user device capabilities. For this purpose we combine user and device models with high-level user interface description languages in order to decouple the interface presentation from its platform, and to generate the most suitable interface on a per-user, per- device basis making use of the semantics that are provided by user and device profile.

Bringing together the physical and digital worlds has been the subject of research for some time now. In particular, a number of successful prototypes that link physical objects with digital information (often called smart object systems) have already been presented. However, a generally accepted architecture to design such systems has not yet emerged. This paper presents a reusable and practical framework for developing smart object applications today. At the basis of our approach lies the use of Semantic Web technology to drive interaction between the physical and digital worlds. We used this framework to develop SemaNews, a novel application that combines the advantages of digital news feeds with those of physical newspapers. To verify the reusability of our architecture, we built a second prototype in a different application domain: STalkingObjects provides the basic components of a store of the future.

During a museum visit, social interaction can improve intellectual, social, personal and cultural development. With the advances in technology, the use of personal mobile handheld devices – such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) – that replace the traditional paper guidebooks is becoming a common sight at various heritage sites all over the world. This technology often leads to problems such as isolating visitors from their companions and distracting visitors away from their surroundings. We believe careful design of mobile applications and taking advantage of low-cost networking infrastructure can avoid such isolation of the visitor from his or her surroundings and encourage interaction with both surroundings and companions. In this paper, we describe our approach to create a mobile handheld guide that supports the learning process by exploiting social interaction between visitors and subtly matching the content and concepts shown on the hand- held guide with what can be found in the museum.

The Block Excemption Regulation of the European Commission was enacted in 2002 with the goal to strengthen competition between dependent and independent repairers in the automotive after-sales market. The FP6 MYCAREVENT project embraces these goals while triggering new business opportunities by establishing a mobile accessible infrastructure as single gateway to different kinds of resources. This information procurement framework allows customers to find specific vehicle repair and diagnostic data from different car manufacturers and 3rd parties in the same way. In order to provide a higher degree of accessibility, extensibility and adaptivity, our service-oriented infrastructure presented in this paper is web-based and consists of three main components: Mobile Clients, Service Portal and Remote Services. New communication and multimedia technologies are invoked to improve interoperability, usability and maintenance of the underlying Mobile Service World. In this paper we focus on the architecture of our highly flexible procurement infrastructure. Standardized elements and methodologies ensure an integrated solution and enable easy expandability with new content, services and components.

In this paper we report on our work to enable "laid-back" social interactions using television as a primary interaction medium. By integrating semantic web techniques with interactive television we were able to create smart applications that can run as extensions of television shows and stimulate groups of users to communicate. Groups are based on the shared characteristics that can be found for subsets of spectators. Communication between spectators is brought about at two levels: direct communication like instant messaging and indirect communication like cooperating in a team to win a quiz. Our system does not necessarily require a new television format, but is able to reuse existing television shows and to "socialize" them so they can be re-broadcasted with support for group interaction.

This paper describes a framework to enable implicit interaction between mobile users in order to establish and maintain social networks according to the preferences and needs of each individual. A user model is proposed which can be constructed by the user and appended with information regarding the user's privacy preferences. Design choices and tool support regarding the framework are discussed.