Multimodality and Environment Semantics

Safe access to urban environments depends upon a variety of circumstances, among which the abilities of the persons and the complexity of the environment raise interesting issues about design and usability of help systems and information points. This paper proposes a methodology for designing systems able to guide users in finding and accessing the objects and services of a complex environment. The methodology is based on the identification of the user oriented features of the environment and on its mapping onto a semantically enriched 3D virtual world. The physical environment is described at different levels of granularity, functionally and geometrically. Its functional properties are referred to a scene-independent ontology, granting a level of interoperability between different environments. An implementation architecture based on Web standards is proposed for communicating information and signs related to the user location and for generating support to ease the navigation. A case study about the creation of a guided tour through the indoors and outdoors of the town of Venice through a multimodal Web browser is presented.