Information Technology Applications in Hospitality and Tourism: A Review of Publications from 2005 to 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale

Assessing electronic government readiness of public organisations: effect of internal factors (case of Egypt).

Governments have become more and more interested in embracing Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and have made a remarkable progress over the last few years. Electronic Government (e-government) - described as the strategic use of ICT to transform the public sector - is presently recognised as a driver and a key enabler of citizen-centric, cooperative, and seamless modern governance. E-government implementation implies not only a profound transformation in the way government interacts with the governed, but also a reinvention of its internal processes and how public organisations carry their business both internally as well as externally while interacting with the other segments of the community. Based on the literature, it is frequently claimed that the availability of an effective E-Government Readiness (EGR) assessment framework is a necessary condition for advancing e-government proper implementation. Most e-government appraisal models address the Electronic Service (e-service) dimension of e-government that focuses on the services provided by the government to the citizens on the Internet. This gives a very narrow perspective to e-government ignoring a key dimension: the Electronic Administration (e-administration), that highlights the importance of modernising the public sector, increasing government productivity, and transforming its internal processes. Furthermore, developed models assess E-Government Readiness (EGR) on a country as a whole without conducting an in-depth assessment on a public organisation scale. In addition, the majority of these models do not take into consideration the opinion of the civil servants involved in such e-government programs, a key stakeholder that affects their success. The objective of this thesis is to develop a framework that assesses EGR focusing on e-administration within public organisations through obtaining its employees‟ feedback. The suggested framework investigated the internal factors affecting EGR categorised into four dimensions: (i) strategy, (ii) people, (iii) technology, and (iv) processes. A number of measuring constructs are identified under each dimension. The framework components, relationships, and hypotheses were derived from the literature on Electronic Readiness (e-readiness), EGR, Information Systems (IS) and Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) success. In order to test the proposed framework, the thesis examined the relations and interactions of these components in an emerging e-government environment using four case studies of different characteristics to represent public organisations in Egypt. These organisations cover municipalities, investment, tax payment, and health sectors. Quantitative data collection method was through distributing a questionnaire to a sample of employees in each organisation. Data obtained from the questionnaire in each organisation was triangulated with data gathered from other sources of evidence: (i) interviews with top management, (ii) documentations, (iii) archival records, and (iv) observations. Findings of the empirical research were evaluated against the framework suggested in the beginning leading to a final framework that assesses EGR of public organisations. Findings revealed that framework's hypotheses were all confirmed. Concerning Egypt's EGR assessment, results proved that processes, technology, and people have a high effect on EGR, whereas strategy has a modest impact on it. This reflects that strategy is not given a high value in terms of e-government and that top management need to further promote e-government within public Egyptian organisations. Findings revealed also the modest impact of strategy on the two dimensions: technology and processes compared with its high effect on people. The research highlighted also the different measuring constructs that have the highest weights in each of the four dimensions. This helps in understanding e-government environment of public organisations in Egypt, showing the main components that affect EGR. The thesis though provides a rich insight into investigating e-administration within public organisations especially in a developing country such as Egypt, and presents a systematic approach to assess EGR of public organisations based on the four e-government building blocks: (i) strategy, (ii) people, (iii) technology, and (iv) processes. Therefore the thesis contributes to research areas in the literature related to assessments of information systems, e-commerce, e-readiness, and e-government readiness

Evaluation of User Interface: A Case of Iranian Disability Websites

Improving the user interface of websites for people with disabilities can increase the use of websites, which helps promote the quality of life of disabled people. The aim of this study was to explore and evaluate user interface design criteria of Iranian websites for those with physical-motor disabilities. Heuristic evaluation was used in the present study. The user interface criteria of websites for the disabled were extracted from previous studies and a self-made log list was then used to assess the criteria. Six out of forty-five websites in the field of the disabled were selected by purposive sampling and surveyed. Ten main criteria and 76 subcomponents were identified for websites. Display design and search criteria were the most and least important for experts, respectively. Assessments showed that all ten criteria were met to a desired level (average of 62.66%) on websites. Consistency and search criteria had the highest and lowest compliance with criteria with 88.25 and 53.47%, respectively. The website of Irantavana and Iranian Disabled Community received the highest and lowest scores in user interface, respectively. This study can be used as a suitable guide for more efficient design of websites for the disabled

Web Accessibility of the Higher Education Institute Websites Based on the World Wide Web Consortium and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act

The problem observed in this study is the low level of compliance of higher education website accessibility with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The literature supports the non-compliance of websites with the federal policy in general. Studies were performed to analyze the accessibility of fifty-four sample web pages using automated testing via auto-validation tools and using manual testing via assistive technology, followed by a comparative analysis of the findings of the auto validation tools. The auto-validation tools utilized on the sample web pages were comprised of three W3C validation tools. The results showed that two-thirds of the websites failed Priority 1 validation, while one hundred percent of the websites failed to meet the Priority 2 and Priority 3 validation. In addition, three web pages were tested against Section 508 guidelines. The result of the manual testing by assistive technology confirmed that all three websites failed to meet the minimum requirement of federal policy. Moreover, a comparative analysis between the validations of the W3C tools showed that significant differences existed between the findings of each auto-validation tool. The findings of this study implied that passing the evaluations of auto validation tools is not enough to ensure accessible websites to individuals with disabilities. It is important to utilize assistive tools to determine web accessibility as it appears to individuals with disabilities. Recommendations were made for improvements such as encouraging universities to provide training for website managers and implementing the mandatory use of screen-readers as a validation tool

Building capacity in climate change policy analysis and negotiation: methods and technologies

Capacity building is often cited as the reason “we cannot just pour money into developing countries” and why so many development projects fail because their design does not address local conditions. It is therefore a key technical and political concept in international development. Some of the poorest countries in the world are also some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their vulnerability is in part due to a lack of capacity to plan and anticipate the effects of climate change on crops, water resources, urban electricity demand etc. What capacities do these countries lack to deal with climate change? How will they cope? What steps can they take to reduce their vulnerability? This innovative and high-profile research project was part of a larger project (called C3D) and conducted with non-governmental organisations in Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The research involved several participatory workshops and a questionnaire to all three research centres

BlogForever D5.1: Design and Specification of Case Studies

This document presents the specification and design of six case studies for testing the BlogForever platform implementation process. The report explains the data collection plan where users of the repository will provide usability feedback through questionnaires as well as details of scalability analysis through the creation of specific log files analytics. The case studies will investigate the sustainability of the platform, that it meets potential users’ needs and that is has an important long term impact

Question answering systems for health professionals at the point of care -- a systematic review

Objective: Question answering (QA) systems have the potential to improve the quality of clinical care by providing health professionals with the latest and most relevant evidence. However, QA systems have not been widely adopted. This systematic review aims to characterize current medical QA systems, assess their suitability for healthcare, and identify areas of improvement. Materials and methods: We searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ACL Anthology and forward and backward citations on 7th February 2023. We included peer-reviewed journal and conference papers describing the design and evaluation of biomedical QA systems. Two reviewers screened titles, abstracts, and full-text articles. We conducted a narrative synthesis and risk of bias assessment for each study. We assessed the utility of biomedical QA systems. Results: We included 79 studies and identified themes, including question realism, answer reliability, answer utility, clinical specialism, systems, usability, and evaluation methods. Clinicians' questions used to train and evaluate QA systems were restricted to certain sources, types and complexity levels. No system communicated confidence levels in the answers or sources. Many studies suffered from high risks of bias and applicability concerns. Only 8 studies completely satisfied any criterion for clinical utility, and only 7 reported user evaluations. Most systems were built with limited input from clinicians. Discussion: While machine learning methods have led to increased accuracy, most studies imperfectly reflected real-world healthcare information needs. Key research priorities include developing more realistic healthcare QA datasets and considering the reliability of answer sources, rather than merely focusing on accuracy.Comment: Accepted to the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA

Assessing the Relative Importance of an E-learning system Usability Design Characteristics Based on Students' Preferences

This study considers the interaction between an e-learning system, the Blackboard system, and the students who use it in Saudi Arabia. While previous work exists, there is limited consideration of the assessment of the preferences of e-learning system usability variables based on students’ perspectives, especially in developing countries such as Saudi Arabia. This paper attempts to fill the gap by investigating the relative importance of the design criteria developed for e-learning system usability evaluation from the students’ perspective in Saudi tertiary education. Based on reviewed literature, a set of usability principles was developed that have had an influence in the students’ learning process and use of the e-learning system. The list includes system navigation, system learnability, visual design, information quality, instructional assessment and system interactivity. An exploratory study was carried out to identify the most important usability design characteristics from a student’s perspective and then evaluate the overall usability of the current e-learning system, based on this subset. A quantitative approach was adopted to weigh usability design characteristics, based on 181 learners’ perceptions. The sample consists of undergraduates who are users of a web-based e-learning system in a university in Saudi Arabia. The research instrument was tested for construct validity and reliability. The analysed results have shown that information quality is the most important dimension followed by the navigation of the e-learning system. The study has also revealed that the system learnability and visual design came third and fourth in order of importance of e-learning system usability assessment. Finally, the least important design categories that influenced the e-learning system usability assessment were instructional assessment and system interactivity. The empirical results of this study may help to provide insights for designers and evaluators leading to a more effective approach to improve the usability and uptake of the e-learning system

Lund University Website Evaluation: Focus on homepage and English research pages

The present universities have their own websites to achieve academic goals, and for this reason, the process of maintaining a high quality and effective website is vital for a university to strengthen its unpredictable creativity and entrepreneurialism. The aim of this study was to develop and validate university website usability, quality and performance, especially focuses on English homepage and research pages. In addition, we will develop a model of how to evaluate university website. Specific objectives were to identify major usability issues and provide a foundation for future development work. The web evaluation methods adopted during the study fall into three major classes: usability testing, user feedback and usage data. Results indicated that English information on website is incomplete, layout and design of the English homepage need to be improved, and the quality of the English research pages varied dramatically. Some web pages were of high standard, enabling quick access to current research and reinforcing the university’s brand as a high quality university conducting world’s leading research. Other web pages were a usability disaster, giving poor user satisfaction and negatively affecting the credibility of the university. The study recommends making an improvement in content, design, layout and new technology, it is necessary to work closely with the faculties and institutes on a ‘case by case’ basis, and finally to improve site performance