Mobile Devices to Assist Cultural Visits

Traditional visits to environments interesting from a cultural point of view are based on technologies that do not permit flexibility and modification to the visit itself on the basis of the visitors' profile. Software agents running on personal mobile devices can overcome such limitations and lead to personalised visits. The innovative technology based on mobile agents seems to well fit this scenario, where the agents on the mobile devices can interact with fixed HW/SW infrastructures. This paper proposes the reuse of several concepts from the mobile agent technology in the design of distributed applications based on mobile devices. In particular, coordination issues are addressed, and reactive tuple spaces are proposed as coordination means: thanks to their openness and flexibility, they well suit a scenario composed by mobile entities.