VID: Virtual Information Desk

Navid Seidi, Farshad Eshghi, Manoochehr Kelarestaghi

Abstract: Organizations providing services to public, generally comprise three representative entities, staff, events, and processes. Since these entities involve in not-necessarily time-wise predictable phenomena, service delivery in such organizations is inherently fluid, particularly in specific-staff dependent service providers or organizations. To provide service receivers (clients) with satisfactory experience, keeping them informed regarding service parameters is of great importance. While traditional information systems serve an organization internally, systems that provide such information for clients (external to the organization), too, prove to be useful regarding service experience. Information by its nature can be divided into static and dynamic. Static information are less exposed to changes while dynamic information are more volatile. There might be situations where, in a specific organization, dynamic information override static information for a specific period of time. Dissemination methods for static and dynamic information are different. Thanks to ubiquitous and pervasive computing, advancements in communication technologies, and accessibility of processing power, the concept of real-time information systems, once unimaginable, has become a reality today. Focusing on dynamic information, and in particular last-minute change information, in this paper, we devise and present an implementation of VID system which is a new distributed information dissemination/update system for specific-staff dependent service providers or organizations such as educational institutions where events are very much dependent on specific people's presence.