Integrated ambient services as enhancement to physical marketplaces

Ambient services are services that are related to the surrounding physical environment of the user, and can be considered a form of location-based services. Different kinds of ambient shopping services have been developed to aid users including brokerage services, navigational services, comparison shopping, product search, location-based auctions, wireless advertising, and even informational services where a user can point a device to a particular product or shop to find out more about it. With mobile devices, these services are made available at the point when the user needs it, for example, when they are at a shopping mall or in a busy tourist shopping complex. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of how a set of locally useful ambient services can be meaningfully organized based on the user´s physical location and intended tasks to enhance a physical marketplace such as a shopping street or a shopping mall. We also outline an architecture for the system and how rule-based service composition can be performed on the client-side.