Implementation of a Knowledge Management Methodology based on Ontologies :Case of Tourism

in this paper, we suggest a methodology of knowledge management that makes use of the new possibilities offered by semantic web technologies and covers the various stages of the project life cycle. In fact, with this new vision of ontologies and semantic web, it is important to provide a strong methodological support in order to develop complex ontology-based systems

Analyzing Tag Semantics Across Collaborative Tagging Systems

The objective of our group was to exploit state-of-the-art Information Retrieval methods for finding associations and dependencies between tags, capturing and representing differences in tagging behavior and vocabulary of various folksonomies, with the overall aim to better understand the semantics of tags and the tagging process. Therefore we analyze the semantic content of tags in the Flickr and Delicious folksonomies. We find that: tag context similarity leads to meaningful results in Flickr, despite its narrow folksonomy character; the comparison of tags across Flickr and Delicious shows little semantic overlap, being tags in Flickr associated more to visual aspects rather than technological as it seems to be in Delicious; there are regions in the tag-tag space, provided with the cosine similarity metric, that are characterized by high density; the order of tags inside a post has a semantic relevance

Data-driven Initiatives of Destinations Supporting Sustainable Tourism

Digitization has arrived at the heart of global tourism. However, due to challenges such as climate change and overtourism, touristic destinations not only need to become more digital but also more sustainable. Although ever-increasing quantities of touristic data provide a growing basis for innovative digital solutions, destinations vary widely in driving sustainable, data-driven initiatives due to uncertain targets and challenging data acquisition. Despite its rising importance, research still lacks a thorough understanding of how destinations can use data to become more sustainable. We build on interviews with ten destination management organizations (DMOs) to develop a taxonomy of their data-driven initiatives for sustainable tourism to address this issue. Our findings contribute to research by bridging the gap between available data sources and important targets of data-driven initiatives from the unique perspective of touristic destinations. For practice, we provide a structured overview for positioning own ambitions of DMOs

Neogeography: The Challenge of Channelling Large and Ill-Behaved Data Streams

Neogeography is the combination of user generated data and experiences with mapping technologies. In this article we present a research project to extract valuable structured information with a geographic component from unstructured user generated text in wikis, forums, or SMSes. The extracted information should be integrated together to form a collective knowledge about certain domain. This structured information can be used further to help users from the same domain who want to get information using simple question answering system. The project intends to help workers communities in developing countries to share their knowledge, providing a simple and cheap way to contribute and get benefit using the available communication technology

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

An Ontology-Based Decision Support System to Foster Innovation and Competitiveness Opportunities of Health Tourism Destinations

The competitiveness of nature-based Health Tourism (NHT) industry, especially in the Alpine regions, is increasingly linked to the sustainability and exploitation of unique natural resources of tourism destinations, which often lack the access to knowledge and networks of stakeholders to improve their offerings. In this sense, the use of digital tools can open up further opportunities to reconsider value offerings and better access different knowledge resources and relationships within the industry network. This Chapter illustrates the collaborative design approach adopted in HEALPS2 for the development of an ontology-based Decision Support System for health tourism destinations. The resulting ontology aims to model the relationships between the available natural resources, the value offerings and the target groups of NHT destinations. Moreover, the Collaborative Design approach foresees the involvement of end-users (i.e. not only tourism destinations, but also the network of stakeholders, and the actual and potential future tourists) as both sources of knowledge and validators of the ontology and its outputs, aiming to inform decision-making processes in a shared knowledge model that leverages on digital tools

Enabling Scalable Multi-channel Communication through Semantic Technologies

With the advance of the Web in the direction Social Media the number of communication possibilities has exponentially increased bringing new challenges and opportunities for companies to build and shape their reputation online as well as to engage and maintain the relationships to their customers. In this paper we describe how semantic technologies enable scalable, effective and efficient on-line communication. We illustrate four different ways in which semantics can be used for this purpose. First, we discuss semantic analysis of communication items based on 'classical' semantic, such as natural language processing. Second, we look at semantics as a channel, viewing Linked Open Data vocabularies not only as terminological assets but as communication channels. Third, semantics provide the methodologies and tools for content modeling by means of ontologies. Finally, semantics through semantic matchmaking enable semi-automatic assignment and distribution of content to channels and vice-versa

Technology Integration around the Geographic Information: A State of the Art

One of the elements that have popularized and facilitated the use of geographical information on a variety of computational applications has been the use of Web maps; this has opened new research challenges on different subjects, from locating places and people, the study of social behavior or the analyzing of the hidden structures of the terms used in a natural language query used for locating a place. However, the use of geographic information under technological features is not new, instead it has been part of a development and technological integration process. This paper presents a state of the art review about the application of geographic information under different approaches: its use on location based services, the collaborative user participation on it, its contextual-awareness, its use in the Semantic Web and the challenges of its use in natural languge queries. Finally, a prototype that integrates most of these areas is presented

SPETA: Social pervasive e-tourism advisor

Tourism is one of the major sources of income for many countries. Therefore, providing efficient, real-time service for tourists is a crucial competitive asset which needs to be enhanced using major technological advances. The current research has the objective of integrating technological innovation into an information system, in order to build a better user experience for the tourist. The principal strength of the approach is the fusion of context-aware pervasive systems, GIS systems, social networks and semantics. This paper presents the SPETA system, which uses knowledge of the user’s current location, preferences, as well as a history of past locations, in order to provide the type of recommender services that tourists expect from a real tour guide.This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Commerce under the GODO project (FIT-340000-2007-134), under the PIBES project of the Spanish Committee of Education and Science (TEC2006-12365-C02-01) and under the MID-CBR project of the Spanish Committee of Education and Science (TIN2006-15140-C03-02).Publicad