Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research

This paper reviews the published articles on eTourism in the past 20 years. Using a wide variety of sources, mainly in the tourism literature, this paper comprehensively reviews and analyzes prior studies in the context of Internet applications to Tourism. The paper also projects future developments in eTourism and demonstrates critical changes that will influence the tourism industry structure. A major contribution of this paper is its overview of the research and development efforts that have been endeavoured in the field, and the challenges that tourism researchers are, and will be, facing

A Framework to Support Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage Studies Research

Developments in information and communication technologies and their repercussions for how cultural heritage is preserved, used and produced are the subject of several research and innovation efforts in Europe. Advanced digital technologies create new opportunities for cultural heritage to drive innovation. Digital humanities are an important domain for cultural heritage research in Europe and beyond. Digital tools and methods can be used in innovative ways in cultural heritage research. The research and innovation efforts and framework of digital humanities, and cultural heritage as one of its research fields, are influenced by EU policies and legislation. This article describes the existing policy initiatives, practices and related legal setting as framework conditions for digital humanities and cultural heritage research and innovation in Europe – focusing on urban history applications in the age of digital libraries. This is a multifaceted study of the state of the art in policies, legislation and standards – using a survey with 1000 participants, literature surveys on copyrights and policies

A flexible framework for assessing the quality of crowdsourced data

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.Crowdsourcing as a means of data collection has produced previously unavailable data assets and enriched existing ones, but its quality can be highly variable. This presents several challenges to potential end users that are concerned with the validation and quality assurance of the data collected. Being able to quantify the uncertainty, define and measure the different quality elements associated with crowdsourced data, and introduce means for dynamically assessing and improving it is the focus of this paper. We argue that the required quality assurance and quality control is dependent on the studied domain, the style of crowdsourcing and the goals of the study. We describe a framework for qualifying geolocated data collected from non-authoritative sources that enables assessment for specific case studies by creating a workflow supported by an ontological description of a range of choices. The top levels of this ontology describe seven pillars of quality checks and assessments that present a range of techniques to qualify, improve or reject data. Our generic operational framework allows for extension of this ontology to specific applied domains. This will facilitate quality assurance in real-time or for post-processing to validate data and produce quality metadata. It enables a system that dynamically optimises the usability value of the data captured. A case study illustrates this framework

An Ontology for Modeling Cultural Heritage Knowledge in Urban Tourism

Urban tourism information available on Internet has been of enormous relevance to motivate the tourism in many countries. There exist many applications focused on promoting and preserving the cultural heritage, through urban tourism, which in turn demand a well-defined and standard model for representing the whole knowledge of this domain, thus ensuring interoperable and flexible applications. Current studies propose the use of ontologies to formally model such knowledge. Nonetheless, most of them only represent partial knowledge of cultural heritage or are restrictive to an indoor perspective (i.e., museum ontologies). In this context, we propose the ontology CURIOCITY ( Cultural Heritage for Urban Tourism in Indoor/Outdoor environments of the CITY ), to represent the cultural heritage knowledge based on UNESCO’s definitions. CURIOCITY ontology has a three-level architecture (Upper, Middle, and Lower ontologies) in accordance with a purpose of modularity and levels of specificity. In this paper, we describe in detail all modules of CURIOCITY ontology and perform a comparative evaluation with state-of-the-art ontologies. Additionally, to demonstrate the suitability of CURIOCITY ontology, we show several touristic services offered through a framework supported in the ontology. The framework includes an automatic population process, that allows transforming a museum data repository (in CSV format) into RDF triples of CURIOCITY ontology to automatically populate the CURIOCITY repository, and facilities to develop a set of tourism applications and services, following the UNESCO’s definitions