As smartphone and location-based service are becoming widely available due to synergy effect of two, the indoor location-related technology are gaining more interest as the next-generation location-based service. This paper introduces and a genuine framework of Indoor Venue Search/Recommendation System that may be applied for indoor shopping areas with indoor positioning technologies. By using QR-codes as basis of use location detection, the experiment was performed in a shopping area with +400 customers to analyze their search behaviors of searching shops through Indoor Venue Search System.
As any mobile Location-based Service (mLBS), the key to successfully capture users is toshorten the usage time (due to mobility of the user). However, users are likely to get confused to find the venue of their choice without simple and clean categorization of venues in shopping mall or any type of indoor plaza. By researching optimal venue search result number on a limited area of smartphone screen, this research may benefit the service developers to categorize venues according to the result and number of venues in a category and simultaneously benefit the users by increasing the search efficiency. In a broader spectrum, this research aims better recommendation for mobile location-based venue search system since time is a good indicator of good recommendation.
The research conducts real-world experiments to see how user-interface of Indoor Venue Search System affects customers to make a faster decision. The goal is to find a correlation between number venue search results on a smartphone screen vs. user decision time. The experiment prototype of Indoor Venue Search System is designed using open smartphone-friendly platform such as HTML5, MSSQL, QR-code, and JQuery. Also, to be applicable for most of indoor positioning technologies for future use, QR-code was used to mock user detection unction.

修士学位論文. 2011年度システムエンジニアリング学 第53号