Cultural applications for mobile devices: issues and requirements for authoring tools and development platforms

This paper explores requirements that authoring tools and development platforms should satisfy for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. To effectively determine such requirements the paper reviews the use of mobile technologies in the context of cultural organizations and tourism and examines three "real world" case studies that focus on the use of PDAs and mobile phones for providing cultural and tourist information, keeping the visitors' interest and attention, as well as promoting various cultural organizations and tourist facilities. This approach allows the extraction of a set of PDA and mobile phone application requirements, the implementation of which is based on the apparatus offered by authoring tools and development platforms. The paper reviews and evaluates the design and development facilities provided by state-of-the-art multimedia application development tools for PDAs and mobile phones: Macromedia Flash Lite, Navipocket, Java 2 Micro Edition and Microsoft .Net platform for the Mobile Web. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations related to the way authoring tools and development platforms should be exploited in order to gratify application and designer needs for developing cultural and tourist applications