Promotion of Eco-Tourism Using the Practice of Wikipedia: The Case-Study of Environmental and Cultural Paths in Zakynthos

The development of sustainable eco tourism and cultural tourism could have positive effects in many socioeconomic factors of a country. A way of promoting eco-tourism is by using the knowledge and the experiences of different people for presenting the natural and cultural resources. This can be achieved using the practice of Wikipedia, in which anyone can submit information on a subject, in our case the environment, and an administrator reviews what will be published. In this work, we focus on the submission of cartographical data concerning the paths and routes that present environmental and cultural interest. These data have been collected and processed using GIS, Remote Sensing and GPS technologies. For each path a description of the type of the path, the terrain involved, experience needed, estimated time required and a classification of the paths according to the difficulty is attempted. In this paper, we present in detail the collection of data and their submission in the platform

A Tale of Two Superpowers: Nigeria and China Relations

The study discusses the historical development of the Sino-Nigerian bilateral relations. The paper provides a detailed view of china\u27s FDI in Nigeria and the diverse challenges faced by the oil rich country to develop its own economy through NEEDS as a result of china\u27s economic power. China’s partnership with Nigeria is ideally for economic growth but practically poisonous to Nigeria’s development goals as China is solely pursuing its own interest and diverting its partner from working toward its NEEDS goal. A deep investigation of the relations should be reviewed for both countries. This will be needed to produce vital economic growth and ensure a better co-ordination for both countries and to a great extent use the procedures that are most beneficial for a “win- win” partnership

Evaluating Museum Virtual Tours: The Case Study of Italy

Virtual tours in museums are an ideal solution for those that are not able to visit a museum or those who want to have a small taste of what is presented in the museum before their visit. However, these tours often encounter severe problems while users interact with them. In order to check the status of virtual tours of museums, we present the implementation of an evaluation experiment that uses a combination of two multi-criteria decision making theories, namely the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). AHP has been used for the estimation of the weights of the heuristics and fuzzy TOPSIS has been used for the evaluation of virtual tours of museums. This paper presents the exact steps that have to be followed in order to implement such an experiment and run an example experiment for virtual tours of Italian museums

Non-Nuclear Method for HMA density measurements

Density is an important part of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) pavement quality control. The longterm performance of an HMA pavement can be affected by insufficient density of the pavement. This study evaluated the Pavement Quality Indicator (PQI) model 301, which utilizes electrical impedance principles by using the current going through the pavement to determine its density and moisture content. Test data was collected in the field during pavements, and cores samples that were tested in the laboratory for further measurements. Thirteen field site visits were used to evaluate the PQI in terms of accuracy and precision. A thorough investigation of calibration methods was also performed both in the lab, and in the field to improve the accuracy of the PQI"s results. Data analyses showed that the PQI"s accuracy is lower than the nuclear gauge"s. However, the PQI could be a better alternative to a nuclear gauge when the following benefits are considered: 1) economic savings, 2) faster data measurement, 3) minimized safety concerns, 4) no licensing and intense training courses mandated by State and Federal authorities

The Semantics of Movie Metadata: Enhancing User Profiling for Hybrid Recommendation

In movie/TV collaborative recommendation approaches, ratings users gave to already visited content are often used as the only input to build profiles. However, users might have rated equally the same movie but due to different reasons: either because of its genre, the crew or the director. In such cases, this rating is insufficient to represent in detail users’ preferences and it is wrong to conclude that they share similar tastes. The work presented in this paper tries to solve this ambiguity by exploiting hidden semantics in metadata elements. The influence of each of the standard description elements (actors, directors and genre) in representing user’s preferences is analyzed. Simulations were conducted using Movielens and Netflix datasets and different evaluation metrics were considered. The results demonstrate that the implemented approach yields significant advantages both in terms of improving performance, as well as in dealing with common limitations of standard collaborative algorithm.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Personalized Tourist Route Generation

When tourists are at a destination, they typically search for information in the Local Tourist Organizations. There, the staff determines the profile of the tourists and their restrictions. Combining this information with their up-to-date knowledge about the local attractions and public transportation, they suggest a personalized route for the tourist agenda. Finally, they fine tune up this route to better fit tourists' needs. We present an intelligent routing system to fulfil the same task. We divide this process in three steps: recommendation, route generation and route customization. We focus on the last two steps and analyze them. We model the tourist planning problem, integrating public transportation, as the Time Dependent Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TDTOPTW) and we present an heuristic able to solve it on real-time. Finally, we show the prototype which generates and customizes routes in real-time

Effectiveness Study on Temporary Pavement Marking Removals Methods

This study was conducted to identify effective temporary marking removal methods and procedures on concrete and asphalt pavements. Pavement markings provide guidance to road travelers and can lead to accidents when not properly removed. Current state guidelines on removal do not provide clear and objective methods of measurement. After testing the most common removal methods, this research concluded that removing markings by chemical was not only cost and results-oriented effective compared to other methods, but it was also safe to the environment and road users. Finally, a baseline of measurements was developed for this project, along with the feasibility of using digital image processing to objectively determine whether or not a removal method could be deemed effective. Adviser: Yong Ch

Evaluating Museum Virtual Tours: The Case Study of Italy

Virtual tours in museums are an ideal solution for those that are not able to visit a museum or those who want to have a small taste of what is presented in the museum before their visit. However, these tours often encounter severe problems while users interact with them. In order to check the status of virtual tours of museums, we present the implementation of an evaluation experiment that uses a combination of two multi-criteria decision making theories, namely the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). AHP has been used for the estimation of the weights of the heuristics and fuzzy TOPSIS has been used for the evaluation of virtual tours of museums. This paper presents the exact steps that have to be followed in order to implement such an experiment and run an example experiment for virtual tours of Italian museums

Comparing Multi-Criteria Decision Making Models for Evaluating Environmental Education Programs

Educators in the field of Environmental Education often have difficulty identifying and selecting programs that have the potential to best maximize needed resources to implement and achieve desired outcomes. This difficulty is, in part, due to their lack of expertise in evaluation knowledge and practice. The use of multi-criteria decision-making models in evaluating environmental education programs is new and, as a result, not many models have been used and tested in the specific domain. Comparisons of multi-criteria decision-making models have been implemented in various domains but not for environmental education programs’ evaluation. Therefore, we investigate the comparative performance of the SAW, WPM, TOPSIS, and PROMETHEE II models in evaluating and selecting the most appropriate environmental education program. The main objective of this paper is on presenting the different steps of the comparative analysis of multi-criteria decision-making models and on making conclusions on the suitability and robustness of the SAW, WPM, TOPSIS, and PROMETHEE II models in evaluating environmental education programs