This project is related to the strategic action line of ‘Tourism related technologies’ with the aim of improving the existing signaling systems for tourists (of any language) and develop accessible systems in tourist accommodation to help overcome some disabilities (motor, audible, and visual). The consortium created for this project joins together experienced companies in the IT (TMT Factory, Signaletics) and academic research groups (La Salle, UPM, UC3M).

MAVIR Consortium is a research network co-funded by the Regional Government of Madrid under the IV Plan Regional de Investigación Científica e Innovación Tecnológica (IV PRICIT) integrating a multi-disciplinar team made of scientists, engineers, linguists and documentalists working together on two main areas:Human Language Technologies and Scientific Communication via WWW. The thematic network suggested includes 25 doctors organised in 6 research groups (UNED, UAM, UC3M, UEM, UPM and CINDOC) of the CM that from a multi-discipline perspective complement in various dimensions: academic vs.

SemAnts project’s main goal is to promote general access to the information society, thus improving the well-being and everyday life of both citizens and tourists. In order to do this, it is aimed to demonstrate the potential of different technologies to create more sophisticated systems which will have a real impact on the needs of people. The aspect of Information Society focused from SemAnts is the digital content, understood as elements or assemblies of media (video, image, text). These elements may represent information or may also be part of services provided to users.

The project is carried out by a broad Consortium, integrating development enterprises as iSOCO, research centers such as the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), and user entities as is the Bankinter Foundation. It aims to develop a new digital platform providing access to information and services through secure and accessible interaction. It will gather multiple channels of communication, such as web access, instant messaging and intelligent speech processing, that is, able of communicating by means of natural language dialogues.

The “Thuban” project is focused to develop a virtual attendant which interacts with the user and takes into account his position in the environment. This feature provides access to services such as: services relative to the position and trajectory (for example, notice), oriented services to manage these parameters (for example, tracking and guiding to fixed and moving objects) or the description of the situation and/or trajectory and in general, every available service in the system. The Spatio-Temporal database will be the technology used to handle the user tracking and guiding.