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

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

Adapting Recommendations on Environmental Education Programs

Stakeholders in Environmental Education (EE) often face difficulties identifying and selecting programs that best suit their needs. This is due, in part, to the lack of expertise in evaluation knowledge and practice, as well as to the absence of a unified database of Environmental Education Programs (EEPs) with a defined structure. This article presents the design and development of a web application for evaluating and selecting EEPs. The certified users of the application can insert, view, and evaluate the registered EEPs. At the same time, the application creates and maintains for each user an individual and dynamic user model reflecting their personal preferences. Finally, using all the above information and applying a combination of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods (MCDM), the application provides a comparative and adaptive evaluation in order to help each user to select the EEPs that best suit his/her needs. The personalized recommendations are based on the information about the user stored in the user model and the results of the EEPs evaluations by the users that have applied them. As a case study, we used the EEPs from the Greek Educational System

Dynamic Reasoning in an Intelligent User Interface by an Index-Maximizing LP Model *

Abstract- This paper presents the way that an Index