A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

The role of public transport in addressing sustainable mobility for the elderly population in Malta

Over the past few years, several countries have continued experiencing a growth in their elderly population. Similarly, a number of towns and villages in Malta registered a high elderly population in the last census (NSO, 2012). The elderly people are one of the dominant ‘transport disadvantaged’ groups in the community. This research aims to analyse whether the current public transport system in Malta is providing effective and efficient mobility for elderly in the town of Luqa. In order to analyse this, the study analysed spatial accessibility, sought to identify barriers encountered by the elderly when using public transport and determine temporal accessibility to medical care. Data was collected using telephone surveys, travel time and bus frequency surveys. Statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS 20 and Geographic Information Systems. The study showed that proximity to bus stops in Luqa does not affect public transport use amongst the elderly. The main barriers that elderly encounter when using public transport are mainly related to long waiting times, lack of comfort on bus stops and inaccessible travel information. Finally, temporal accessibility from Luqa to the State’s general hospital, Mater Dei, still requires improvements as it does not meet the desired time budgets of elderly people. By identifying the main concerns this study seeks to encourage policy makers and planners to target future development in public transport taking into consideration the requirements of the growing elderly population.peer-reviewe

Public Participation GIS for sustainable urban mobility planning: methods, applications and challenges

Sustainable mobility planning is a new approach to planning, and as such it requires new methods of public participation, data collection and data aggregation. In the article we present an overview of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) methods with potential use in sustainable urban mobility planning. We present the methods using examples from two recent case studies conducted in Polish cities of Poznań and Łodź. Sustainable urban mobility planning is a cyclical process, and each stage has different data and participatory requirements. Consequently, we situate the PPGIS methods in appropriate stages of planning, based on potential benefits they may bring into the planning process. We discuss key issues related to participant recruitment and provide guidelines for planners interested in implementing methods presented in the paper. The article outlines future research directions stressing the need for systematic case study evaluation

An agent-based approach to assess drivers’ interaction with pre-trip information systems.

This article reports on the practical use of a multi-agent microsimulation framework to address the issue of assessing drivers’ responses to pretrip information systems. The population of drivers is represented as a community of autonomous agents, and travel demand results from the decision-making deliberation performed by each individual of the population as regards route and departure time. A simple simulation scenario was devised, where pretrip information was made available to users on an individual basis so that its effects at the aggregate level could be observed. The simulation results show that the overall performance of the system is very likely affected by exogenous information, and these results are ascribed to demand formation and network topology. The expressiveness offered by cognitive approaches based on predicate logics, such as the one used in this research, appears to be a promising approximation to fostering more complex behavior modelling, allowing us to represent many of the mental aspects involved in the deliberation process

Dialogue Games for Crosslingual Communication

We describe a novel approach to crosslingual dialogue that supports highly accurate communication of semantically complex content between people who do not speak the same language. The approach is introduced through an implemented application that covers the same ground as the chapter of a conventional phrase book for food shopping. We position the approach with respect to dialogue systems and Machine Translation-based approaches to crosslingual dialogue. The current work is offered as a first step towards the innovative use of dialogue theories for the enhancement of human–human dialogue

A comparison of linear and calendar travel itinerary visualizations for personal digital assistants

Various graphical travel itinerary visualization systems have in recent years been developed to allow making easier references between different events such as flights and hotel bookings on a travel itinerary, thereby addressing a problem with tabular itineraries which list travel events in a chronological order of date and time, and only allow referencing consecutive events. These graphical travel itinerary systems are based on a linear visualization of travel events. Although this linear visualization deals with some of the problems associated with tabular itineraries, it is not the only form of visualization which might be capable of addressing these issues. This paper introduces a new visualization of travel itineraries, called the calendar visualization, which relies on a more familiar concept of calendars to depict the relationships between travel events. This paper also describes an empirical study undertaken to compare the calendar and linear itinerary visualizations

Discovery exhibition: using spatial treemaps in local authority decision making and reporting

At Leicestershire County Council we are using spatial treemaps to analyse labour markets and commuting behaviour. This novel visualization technique, presented at InfoVis 2008, has resulted in a number of insights and discoveries. Transport planners in our organization indicate that the graphics are effective and have advantages over alternatives. As researchers in the local authority we report upon using these graphics to inform decision makers and residents in the county’s evidence base for sustainable transport planning