The lifecycle of geotagged data

The world is a big place. At any given instant something is happening somewhere, but even when nothing in particular is going on people still find ways to generate data, such as posting on s

Tourism Destination Management: A Collaborative Approach

Collaboration is a key factor of sustainable growth across territories and industrial sectors. Tourism, one of the largest industries in the world, has been subject to strongest innovation in the last years. Main reasons of this reside both in the availability of new ICTs - Information and Communication Technologies - and organizational models, which directly connect tourists among them and with service providers, and in the always more personalized supply of tourism experience. Tourism destinations can benefit of such innovations if they are able to reorganize the territorial tourism offer around different pattern of collaboration in order to give 2.0 tourists opportunities to live an augmented tourism experience. This paper deals with the possible forms of collaborative networks that can rise within a destination with a focus on relationships between services delivered by the Tourism Destination and the requests of services at the different phases of the tourist 2.0 lifecycle

Farm 2.0 Using Wordpress to Manage Geocontent and Promote Regional Food Products

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Recent innovations in geospatial technology have dramatically increased the utility and ubiquity of cartographic interfaces and spatially-referenced content on the web. Capitalizing on these developments, the Farm2.0 system demonstrates an approach to manage user-generated geocontent pertaining to European protected designation of origin (PDO) food products.Wordpress, a popular open-source publishing platform, supplies the framework for a geographic content management system, or GeoCMS, to promote PDO products in the Spanish province of Valencia. The Wordpress platform is modified through a suite of plug-ins and customizations to create an extensible application that could be easily deployed in other regions and administrated cooperatively by distributed regulatory councils. Content, either regional recipes or map locations for vendors and farms, is available for syndication as a GeoRSS feed and aggregated with outside feeds in a dynamic web map

Smart Tourism Destinations: Can the Destination Management Organizations Exploit Benefits of the ICTs? Evidences from a Multiple Case Study

Recent developments of ICTs enable new ways to experience tourism and conducted to the concept of smart tourism. The adoption of cutting-edge technologies and its combination with innovative organizational models fosters cooperation, knowledge sharing, and open innovation among service providers in tourism destination. Moreover, it offers innovative services to visitors. In few words, they become smart tourism destinations. In this paper, we report first results of the SMARTCAL project aimed at conceiving a digital platform assisting Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) in providing smart tourism services. A DMO is the organization charged with managing the tourism offer of a collaborative network, made up of service providers acting in a destination. In this paper, we adopted a multiple case studies approach to analyze five Italian DMOs. Our aims were to investigate (1) if, and how, successful DMOs were able to offer smart tourism services to visitors; (2) if the ICTs adoption level was related to the collaboration level among DMO partners. First results highlighted that use of smart technologies was still in an embryonic stage of development, and it did not depend from collaboration levels

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Rethinking tourism destinations: collaborative network models for the tourist 2.0

In the increasingly saturated tourism market, an effective tourism destination management is essential to support competitive and sustainable growth. The topic becomes interesting in light of the spread of the collaborative network (CN) organisational models and the massive diffusion of web 2.0 and mobile technology. The formers have proven to give concrete opportunities of development in many industrial sectors, the latter has been changing the way tourists experience a destination. Even if several case studies of CNs in tourism are known, a comprehensive study of how tourism destinations can benefit of CN models and enabling technologies is not present; especially in the effort to help tourism destinations in setting up services able to actively support each phase of the tourist 2.0 lifecycle. In this paper we highlight how CN models are able to support the tourism destination management in order to gain competitiveness for local areas, to improve flexibility in services provision and to give tourists the possibility to live an augmented tourism experience. Furthermore, a review of the most suitable forms of collaborative network for tourism destination and their ways to actively support the augmented experience of the tourist 2.0 are proposed

Mobile phone technologies for disaster risk reduction

The explosion of increasingly sophisticated mobile phone technologies can usefully be harnessed by disaster risk reduction (DRR) as a means of enhancing inclusivity and local relevance of knowledge production and resilience building. However, much new technology is designed on an ad hoc basis without considering user needs – especially mobile applications (apps), which often terminate at the proof-of-concept stage. Here, we examine best practice by marshalling learnings from 45 workers representing 20 organisations working globally across the disaster risk management (DRM) lifecycle, including physical and social science, NGOs, technological developers, and (inter)governmental regulatory bodies. We present a series of generalisable and scalable guidelines that are novel in being independent of any specific natural hazard or development setting, designed to maximise the positive societal impact of exploiting mobile technologies. Specifically, the local context, dynamics, and needs must be carefully interrogated a priori, while any product should ideally be co-developed with local stakeholders through a user-centered design approach