STS

STS is an Android-based mobile application that exploits various contextual factors (e.g., weather, time and location) to provide tourists and other users with recommendations for attractions, events, public services, restaurants, and much more for the South Tyrol region of Italy.
History

STS was officially launched in September 2013 by the two PhD students Matthias Braunhofer and Mehdi Elahi and their supervisor Prof. Francesco Ricci at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Since then it has been continuously updated, and it has been showcased at various events, such as Klimamobility, Innovation Festival and Lunga Notte della Ricerca.
Technical

STS makes use of the most comprehensive databases offered by LTS (Regional Association of South Tyrol's Tourism Organizations), the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, the Municipality of Bolzano, TIS and SASA. It uses innovative mathematical models that can support tourist decision making with personalized context-aware recommendations. It exploits predictions about the state of the environment (parking, weather and traffic).

Search & Recommendations

Search and get recommendations for places of interest in South Tyrol that suite your taste and contextual conditions.

Routing

Find the route to a selected place with your private (bicycle, car) or public transportation means (bus).

Contextual Information

Know the state of traffic, parking and weather conditions all around South Tyrol.

Publications, Presentations and Media Mentions

Publications

Braunhofer, M., Elahi, M., & Ricci, F. (2014). Usability Assessment of a Context-Aware and Personality-Based Mobile Recommender System. In E-Commerce and Web Technologies (pp. 77-88). Munich, Germany: Springer International Publishing. | link

Braunhofer, M., Elahi, M., & Ricci, F. (2014). STS: A Context-Aware Mobile Recommender System for Places of Interest. In Extended Proceedings of User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (pp. 75-80). Aalborg, Denmark. | link

Braunhofer, M., Elahi, M., Ricci, F., & Schievenin, T. (2013). Context-aware points of interest suggestion with dynamic weather data management. In Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2014 (pp. 87-100). Dublin, Ireland: Springer International Publishing. | link

Presentations

South Tyrol Suggests - STS, Tourism Mobility Workshop 2015. Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, 2015. | link

Context-Aware Recommender Systems for Mobile Devices, Computer Science Research Meets Business: App and Mobile Development. Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, 2014. | link

Value-Added Services for Local Search: Innovative Recommender Systems and Routing Models, 2nd INTEGREEN workshop. Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, 2014. | link

Media Mentions

Farbridge, Peter. 'Better Than You Know Yourself'. Academia – Magazin der / Rivista di / Magazine of EURAC & unibz #68. Jan. 2015. | link

stol.it Südtirol Online, Italy. '"Bozen Traffic": Parkplätze Und Fahrpläne Online'. Stol.it, 30 Oct. 2013. | link

GOINFO.IT. 'Ecco Il Bolzano Traffic'. 30 Oct. 2013. | link

Packed With Lots of Useful Features

STS provides many useful features and capabilities ranging from categorical search and context-aware recommendations to parking, traffic and weather status updates. We will be adding more exciting features in the near future, e.g., the integration of a multimodal routing engine, support to plan future visits to places, push recommendations as well as the possibility to run the app on Android Wear. So stay tuned!

See the screenshots!