The Signage project at the University of Southampton is an interdisciplinary effort within the IAM Group in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science. Signage is designed to consider how the digital information space can augment human activity carried out in the physical space. Signage is uniquely situated in Southampton as a 'bridge' project between two EPSRC funded IRCs: AKT in the semantic web space, and Equator in the infrastructure/interaction space. Signage also has participant researchers from the fields of AI, computer vision and eScience.

Our focus for the project is on the Visitor. The concept of the visitor is a rich one for focusing interdisciplinary research and collaboration in the area of exploring the physical-digital space. The visitor focuses us on the multiple aspects of digital requirements for physical spaces: the visit takes place in a specific physical space; a visit is a temporal event; there are classes of visits and visitors.

Each of these visit attributes raises requirements to be addressed concurrently across a number of domains: which systems, services and information will be offered when to whom, what software architectures can handle such diversity of changing information, devices and services, what are the ways the visitors will be able to interact with these services, how will their privacy is protected in any such exchange?

We are considering these questions from four related streams:

• Infrastructure: infrastructure to support multiple devices, services and information interacting concurrently
• Semantic Web: for delivery of information and services
• Hypermedia: for representation of information
• Interaction: consideration of affordances, constraints and requirements for service deployment