Implementing a low-cost, personalized and location based service for delivering advertisements to mobile users

Context aware, personalized services can give users equipped with mobile devices targeted and timely information in a seamless way. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low cost, personalized and location based shopping advertisement service for mobile users. The service is intended to run over WiFi connections between an AP located in a shopping center or mall and on-board or hand-held mobile devices. We describe an Ontology based formulation of user and advertised products profiles and the process followed by an Ontology reasoner to select ads that will interest a particular user with high probability. Dynamic parameters such as the time of day and user location are also taken into account in the selection. A prototype service implementation using the OSGi platform is also discussed. The OSGi technology made our implementation portable enough to run on a great variety of clients and servers. Finally, user privacy issues and computational and communication resource constraints are playing an important role in our design.