An Architecture to Provide Context-Aware Services by Means of Conversational Agents

Proceedings of: Forth Internationl Wokshop on User-Centric Technologies and Applications (CONTEXTS 2010), Valencia, September 7-10, 2010In human-human interaction, a great deal of information is conveyed without explicit communication. This context information characterizes the situation of the different entities involved in the communication process (users, place, environment and computational objects). In this paper, we present an agent-based architecture that incorporates this valuable information to provide the most adapted service to the user. One of the main characteristics of our proposal is the incorporation of conversational agents handling different domains and adapted taking into account the different users requirements and preferences by means of a context manager. This way, we ensure a natural communication between the user and the system to provide a personalized service. The implementation of our proposed architecture to develop and evaluate a context-aware railway information system is also described.Funded by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255, and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad