Ontological model of multi-source smart space content for use in cultural heritage trip planning

This paper presents ontological model for storage of cultural heritage and trip planning information in Smart Space. This model combines external information service-specific ontologies to the one generic ontology and provides easy way to construct distributed Smart Space-based service from various modules. Cultural heritage information presented in ontological model is used to search and recommend attractions. The paper contains proposed high-level service architecture and description of various use cases which are verified presented ontological model

Smartphoned Tourists in the Phygital Tourist Experience

The present thesis explores how the tourist experience is re-articulated through the mediation of smartphones. I adopt the postphenomenological theory of mediation as the overarching ontological position, placing the role of technologies on an ontological level, as mediators of perception and experience. The new tourist that emerges from smartphone mediation is the smartphoned tourist, that is a tourist whose experience is shaped by the availability and use of this technology.The thesis focuses on two aspects: first, how smartphones mediate tourist information behaviour. It is argued that information behaviour is a more comprehensive term than information search behaviour because it includes a passive component of behaviour, where information is not only actively searched, but also encountered serendipitously. The concept of planned serendipity is proposed to indicate how smartphone-mediated information behaviour is complex and cannot be reduced to a dichotomy of serendipity and planning. Second, how smartphones mediate tourists’ experiences of phygital worlds. The term phygital is adopted to indicate how the technologically mediated tourist experience is neither physical nor digital, but both. These questions are answered through conceptual and empirical work in four papers.Paper I explores how smartphones mediate tourists’ relationships with traditional information sources, in particular the guidebook. The study applies the theory of consumer value to understand how the guidebook is not only used for information purposes, but is also valued as an object of consumption. The different types of value attributed to the guidebook are preferential and relative to the smartphone.In Paper II, after a reflection on the technological mediation of the experience on-site, a qualitative methodology is presented, which combines the experience sampling method with semi-structured interviews.Paper III, offers a critical review of tourist information search behaviour literature and adopts the concept of planned serendipity to investigate how planning and spontaneity are simultaneously reduced and amplified through smartphone mediation.Paper IV focuses on the question of how tourists’ time-space behaviour is mediated by the smartphone, and how such mediation makes the experience phygital. The paper offers a new conceptualization of time geography, adapted to the phygital tourist experience

Instrumentalization in the Public Smart Bikeshare Sector

This thesis is concerned with understanding how smart technologies are conceived, created and implemented, and explores the ways these processes are shaped by historical, geo-political, economic and technical contexts. At its core the thesis is concerned with understanding how technical citizenship and democracy can be preserved within the design process against a backdrop of increasing neoliberalism and technocracy. This is investigated by means of a comparative study of smart public bikeshare schemes in Dublin, Ireland and Hamilton, Canada. These schemes are configured and systemized using a variety of technical and ideological rationales and express the imaginaries of place in significantly different ways. Utilising a conceptual framework derived from Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, the thesis unpacks and problematizes the innovation process in order to understand how the outcomes of these schemes support the way of life of one or another influential social group. The philosophical orientation of the study is critical constructivism which combines a form of constructivism with more systematic and socially critical views of technology. The axis of comparison between the schemes is democratization and the manner in which the rationalizations and embedded cultural assumptions characterizing particular places operate to support or resist more egalitarian forms of participation. Methodologically, Feenberg’s critical framework is supported both by theory-driven thematic coding and critical hermeneutics which is an interpretative process that compliments the theoretical framework and positions issues of power and ideology within a wider, macro-level context. Data sources supporting the research comprise interviews, a variety of documentary sources and the architectures and technical specifications of both smart bikeshare systems. The findings from the research illustrate that despite the pervasiveness of a neoliberal orthodoxy conditioning technology production, citizen-centric design is still possible within a climate of consensus building and cooperation. As such, the thesis adds to the body of knowledge on philosophy of technology, critical urbanism, smart city development, democratic engagement and collaborative infrastructuring. In addition, the conceptual framework, developed in response to the empirical cases, represents an elaboration of Feenberg’s work and so the thesis also makes an important contribution to the analytic and methodological potential of critical theory of technology

Tourism in contemporary cities. Proceedings of the International Tourism Studies Association Conference: University of Greenwich, London, UK 17–19 August 2016 Conference Proceedings

The 6th International Tourism Studies Association (ITSA) Biennial conference was held at the University of Greenwich, London, England from 17‐19 August 2016. This was the first time that the conference had been held in Europe and it provided a unique opportunity to meet, hear from and network with tourism scholars and professionals from across Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. ITSA has a mission to encourage interaction and cooperation between developing and developed countries and the conference was successful in attracting 130 delegates from 29 countries. The main theme of the conference was 'Tourism in Contemporary Cities' with four conference sub‐themes of ‘Tourism Cities and Urban Tourism’, ‘The Chinese Market for European Tourism’, ‘River, Cruise and Maritime Tourism’, and ‘Heritage Tourism in Cities’, The subthemes were chosen to reflect the unique location of the conference on the UNESCO Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, and London which is Europe’s most visited tourist destination. The conference also presented ‘Dark Tourism and Cities’ and ‘Tourism and Communist Heritage’ as special sessions

When Alphabet Inc. plans Toronto's waterfront: New post-political modes of urban governance

‘Smart cities’ has become a hegemonic concept in urban discourses, despite substantial criticism presented by scholarly research and activism. The aim of this research was to understand what happens when one of the big digital corporations enters the field of real estate and land use development and urban planning, how existing institutions respond to this, and how modes of urban governance are affected. Alphabet Inc.’s plans for Toronto’s waterfront provided insights into these questions. Our investigations traced a complex web of place-making practices that involved all levels of government, the general public, and networks of actors throughout the private sector. Methodologically, the discourse was reconstructed with local fieldwork, interviews with key actors, participating in tours and public meetings, and secondary sources. It was found that Alphabet Inc.’s plan to build a world-class digital city contained some lessons for urban studies and urban planning practice. First, Alphabet Inc.’s plans, which unfolded amidst initiatives to expand the knowledge economy, confirmed concerns that the trajectory of neoliberal, market-driven land use and speculation along the waterfront remains unchanged. Second, digital infrastructures are potentially a Trojan Horse. Third, it was seen that municipalities and their modes of urban planning are vulnerable to the political economic manoeuvrings of large corporate power. Fourth, Alphabet Inc. operates as a post-political package driven by a new coalition of politics, where the smart city is sold as a neutral technology. The controversies surrounding the project, however, stirred a civic discourse that might signal a return of the political

GAYME: The development, design and testing of an auto-ethnographic, documentary game about quarely wandering urban/suburban spaces in Central Florida.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking\u27. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man\u27s journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando\u27s most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. The art of cruising city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando\u27s car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid techno-scapes overlaying the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando\u27s car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando\u27s technoscape through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and ways of seeing across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. \u27In Irish culture, quare can mean very or extremely or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word queer. Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term quare versus queer. Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for quareness as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, quareness has an important critical application for considering how Orlando\u27s urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed

30th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems. The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstraction levels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases are continuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas of information modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

09101 Abstracts Collection -- Interactive Information Retrieval

From 01.03. to 06.03.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09101 ``Interactive Information Retrieval \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Humanising policy from ‘Warriors to Guardians’: An evaluation of Coordinated Management and Emergency Response Assemblages in Ireland and the US

Coordinated Management and Emergency Response Assemblages (CMaERAs) are complex, multi-faceted, institutionalised networks of emergency response agencies, people, processes, technologies, histories, geographies and cultures which shape the strength of inter-agency coordination and emergency response. This thesis explores how a variety of actors, actants and technologies involved in emergency management assemble and organise. The methodology adopted is qualitative and uses two case studies to evaluate how CMaERA oscillate from their organised shape as dictated by policy to a new shape emanating from the needs of a response call. The case studies were: the Irish Emergency Management Assemblages (IEMA) response to the winter storms of 2015/2016 and the United States Emergency Management Assemblages (USEMA) response to the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. Fifty-one semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders and emergency response agents were conducted and supported by an interpretive analysis of key policy documents. By adopting assemblage theory and applying it to the empirical findings of the IEMA and USEMA, conceptualised within Foucauldian and Agambien understanding of power and sovereignty, this thesis offers a theoretical and philosophical framework to study emergency services, their interactions and power dynamics while keeping in sight their histories, cultures and current situations. This resulted in recognising that CMaERAs re-shape and oscillate position regularly to ensure that response is adequate and efficient. These movements are influenced both by the situation, inter-agency trust, and previous working relationships, but also from external factors, such as the institutionalisation and siloed manner of agencies, (in)formalisation, their relationship with the government, technological advancements, data analytics but also human nature. These broad factors affect inter-agency coordination and collaboration by creating barriers preventing the development of a true Coordinated Management and Emergency Response Assemblage. Finally, it provides three wider contributions to knowledge: expansion of the term ‘vulnerability’, development of embodied assemblages, and the identification of three urban factors which affect assemblage oscillation