When attempting to locate specific spatial information on-line users
face the burden of having to differentiate between relevant and
extraneous spatial content. This problem is more evident in the mobile
environment where users are impeded by several device limitations. One
way of overcoming this is to automatically profile users' spatial
content preferences by recording all interactions users have with maps
and monitoring users' movements in the field as they interact with
maps. We describe a multimodal mobile GIS that implicitly records all
user movements, as well as interactions between users and maps, to
dynamically recommend information and to infer persistent spatial
information preferences. A search engine, prefetching context-aware
information, is incorporated to enhance the users'
experiences. Modeling preferences in this manner allows us to
recommend personalized context-aware spatial content to users whenever
they request maps. A specific case study has been developed around
subjects working on surveying tasks where spatial information is
required in the field.