On the Representativeness of OpenStreetMap for the Evaluation of Country Tourism Competitiveness

[EN] Since 2007, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has issued data on the factors and policies that contribute to the development of tourism and competitiveness across countries worldwide. While WEF compiles the yearly report out of data from governmental and private stakeholders, we seek to analyze the representativeness of the open and collaborative platform OpenStreetMap (OSM) to the international tourism scene. For this study, we selected eight parameters indicative of the tourism development of each country, such as the number of beds or cultural sites, and we extracted the OSM objects representative of these indicators. Then, we performed a statistical and regression analysis of the OSM data to compare and model the data emitted by WEF with data from OSM. Our aim is to analyze the tourist representativeness of the OSM data with respect to official reports to better understand when OSM data can be used to complement the official information and, in some cases, when official information is scarce or non-existent, to assess whether the OSM information can be a substitute. Results show that OSM data provide a fairly accurate picture of official tourism statistics for most variables. We also discuss the reasons why OSM data is not so representative for some variables in some specific countries. All in all, this work represents a step towards the exploitation of open and collaborative data for tourism.This work has been supported by COLCIENCIAS through a PhD scholarship.Bustamante, A.; Sebastiá Tarín, L.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E. (2021). On the Representativeness of OpenStreetMap for the Evaluation of Country Tourism Competitiveness. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 10(5):1-22. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10050301S12210

BITOUR: A Business Intelligence Platform for Tourism Analysis

[EN] Integrating collaborative data in data-driven Business Intelligence (BI) system brings an opportunity to foster the decision-making process towards improving tourism competitiveness. This article presents BITOUR, a BI platform that integrates four collaborative data sources (Twitter, Openstreetmap, Tripadvisor and Airbnb). BITOUR follows a classical BI architecture and provides functionalities for data transformation, data processing, data analysis and data visualization. At the core of the data processing, BITOUR offers mechanisms to identify tourists in Twitter, assign tweets to attractions and accommodation sites from Tripadvisor and Airbnb, analyze sentiments in opinions issued by tourists, and all this using geolocation objects in Openstreetmap. With all these ingredients, BITOUR enables data analysis and visualization to answer questions like the most frequented places by tourists, the average stay length or the view of visitors of some particular destination.This work has been supported by COLCIENCIAS through a PhD scholarship. This work is supported by the Spanish MINECO project TIN2017-88476-C2-1-R.Bustamante, A.; Sebastiá Tarín, L.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E. (2020). BITOUR: A Business Intelligence Platform for Tourism Analysis. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 9(11):1-23. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9110671S123911Nakahira, K. T., Akahane, M., & Fukami, Y. (2012). The Difference and Limitation of Cognition for Piano Playing Skill with Difference Educational Design. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, 609-617. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-29934-6_59Chua, A., Servillo, L., Marcheggiani, E., & Moere, A. V. (2016). Mapping Cilento: Using geotagged social media data to characterize tourist flows in southern Italy. Tourism Management, 57, 295-310. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2016.06.013Karagiannakis, N., Giannopoulos, G., Skoutas, D., & Athanasiou, S. (2015). OSMRec Tool for Automatic Recommendation of Categories on Spatial Entities in OpenStreetMap. Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. doi:10.1145/2792838.2796555Burcher, M., & Whelan, C. (2017). Social network analysis as a tool for criminal intelligence: understanding its potential from the perspectives of intelligence analysts. Trends in Organized Crime, 21(3), 278-294. doi:10.1007/s12117-017-9313-8Alcabnani, S., Oubezza, M., & Elkafi, J. (2019). An approach for the implementation of semantic Big Data Analytics in the Social Business Intelligence process on distributed environments (Cloud computing). Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Big Data and Internet of Things. doi:10.1145/3372938.3373003Zeng, B., & Gerritsen, R. (2014). What do we know about social media in tourism? A review. Tourism Management Perspectives, 10, 27-36. doi:10.1016/j.tmp.2014.01.001Lalicic, L. (2018). Open innovation platforms in tourism: how do stakeholders engage and reach consensus? International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 30(6), 2517-2536. doi:10.1108/ijchm-04-2016-0233Dwyer, L., & Kim, C. (2003). Destination Competitiveness: Determinants and Indicators. Current Issues in Tourism, 6(5), 369-414. doi:10.1080/13683500308667962Gomezelj, D. O., & Mihalič, T. (2008). Destination competitiveness—Applying different models, the case of Slovenia. Tourism Management, 29(2), 294-307. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2007.03.009Zhong, L., Deng, J., & Xiang, B. (2008). Tourism development and the tourism area life-cycle model: A case study of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, China. Tourism Management, 29(5), 841-856. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2007.10.002Fernández, J. I. P., & Rivero, M. S. (2009). Measuring Tourism Sustainability: Proposal for a Composite Index. Tourism Economics, 15(2), 277-296. doi:10.5367/000000009788254377Cibinskiene, A., & Snieskiene, G. (2015). Evaluation of City Tourism Competitiveness. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 213, 105-110. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.411Business Intelligence (BI)—Glossaryhttps://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/business-intelligence-bi/Mariani, M., Baggio, R., Fuchs, M., & Höepken, W. (2018). Business intelligence and big data in hospitality and tourism: a systematic literature review. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 30(12), 3514-3554. doi:10.1108/ijchm-07-2017-0461Maeda, T. N., Yoshida, M., Toriumi, F., & Ohashi, H. (2016). Decision Tree Analysis of Tourists’ Preferences Regarding Tourist Attractions Using Geotag Data from Social Media. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on IoT in Urban Space. doi:10.1145/2962735.2962745Guy, I., Mejer, A., Nus, A., & Raiber, F. (2017). Extracting and Ranking Travel Tips from User-Generated Reviews. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. doi:10.1145/3038912.3052632Peng, M. Y.-P., Tuan, S.-H., & Liu, F.-C. (2017). Establishment of Business Intelligence and Big Data Analysis for Higher Education. Proceedings of the International Conference on Business and Information Management - ICBIM 2017. doi:10.1145/3134271.3134296Castellanos, M., Gupta, C., Wang, S., Dayal, U., & Durazo, M. (2012). A platform for situational awareness in operational BI. Decision Support Systems, 52(4), 869-883. doi:10.1016/j.dss.2011.11.011Cohen, L. (2017). Impacts of business intelligence on population health. Proceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on - SAICSIT ’17. doi:10.1145/3129416.3129441Love, M., Boisvert, C., Uruchurtu, E., & Ibbotson, I. (2016). Nifty with Data. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. doi:10.1145/2899415.2899431Berndt, D. J., Hevner, A. R., & Studnicki, J. (s. f.). Hospital discharge transactions: a data warehouse component. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. doi:10.1109/hicss.2000.926791Musa, G. J., Chiang, P.-H., Sylk, T., Bavley, R., Keating, W., Lakew, B., … Hoven, C. W. (2013). Use of GIS Mapping as a Public Health Tool–-From Cholera to Cancer. Health Services Insights, 6, HSI.S10471. doi:10.4137/hsi.s10471Mooney, S. J., Westreich, D. J., & El-Sayed, A. M. (2015). Commentary. Epidemiology, 26(3), 390-394. doi:10.1097/ede.0000000000000274Wisniewski, M. F., Kieszkowski, P., Zagorski, B. M., Trick, W. E., Sommers, M., & Weinstein, R. A. (2003). Development of a Clinical Data Warehouse for Hospital Infection Control. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(5), 454-462. doi:10.1197/jamia.m1299Miah, S. J., Vu, H. Q., Gammack, J., & McGrath, M. (2017). A Big Data Analytics Method for Tourist Behaviour Analysis. Information & Management, 54(6), 771-785. doi:10.1016/j.im.2016.11.011Li, D., Deng, L., & Cai, Z. (2019). Statistical analysis of tourist flow in tourist spots based on big data platform and DA-HKRVM algorithms. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 24(1), 87-101. doi:10.1007/s00779-019-01341-xKrawczyk, M., & Xiang, Z. (2015). Perceptual mapping of hotel brands using online reviews: a text analytics approach. Information Technology & Tourism, 16(1), 23-43. doi:10.1007/s40558-015-0033-0Alaei, A. R., Becken, S., & Stantic, B. (2017). Sentiment Analysis in Tourism: Capitalizing on Big Data. Journal of Travel Research, 58(2), 175-191. doi:10.1177/0047287517747753Thelwall, M. (2019). Sentiment Analysis for Tourism. Big Data and Innovation in Tourism, Travel, and Hospitality, 87-104. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-6339-9_6Höpken, W., Fuchs, M., Höll, G., Keil, D., & Lexhagen, M. (2013). Multi-Dimensional Data Modelling for a Tourism Destination Data Warehouse. Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2013, 157-169. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-36309-2_14Sabou, M., Onder, I., Brasoveanu, A. M. P., & Scharl, A. (2015). Towards Cross-Domain Decision Making in Tourism: A Linked Data Based Approach. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2580242Fermoso, A. M., Mateos, M., Beato, M. E., & Berjón, R. (2015). Open linked data and mobile devices as e-tourism tools. A practical approach to collaborative e-learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 51, 618-626. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.032Wöber, K. W. (2003). Information supply in tourism management by marketing decision support systems. Tourism Management, 24(3), 241-255. doi:10.1016/s0261-5177(02)00071-7Vajirakachorn, T., & Chongwatpol, J. (2017). Application of business intelligence in the tourism industry: A case study of a local food festival in Thailand. Tourism Management Perspectives, 23, 75-86. doi:10.1016/j.tmp.2017.05.003Diakopoulos, N., Naaman, M., & Kivran-Swaine, F. (2010). Diamonds in the rough: Social media visual analytics for journalistic inquiry. 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology. doi:10.1109/vast.2010.5652922Bustamante, A., Sebastia, L., & Onaindia, E. (2019). Can Tourist Attractions Boost Other Activities Around? A Data Analysis through Social Networks. Sensors, 19(11), 2612. doi:10.3390/s19112612Yasseri, T., Quattrone, G., & Mashhadi, A. (2013). Temporal analysis of activity patterns of editors in collaborative mapping project of OpenStreetMap. Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. doi:10.1145/2491055.2491068Jilani, M., Corcoran, P., & Bertolotto, M. (2013). Multi-granular Street Network Representation towards Quality Assessment of OpenStreetMap Data. Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science - IWCTS ’13. doi:10.1145/2533828.2533833Luxen, D., & Vetter, C. (2011). Real-time routing with OpenStreetMap data. Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems - GIS ’11. doi:10.1145/2093973.2094062Baumbach, S., Rubel, C., Ahmed, S., & Dengel, A. (2019). Geospatial Customer, Competitor and Supplier Analysis for Site Selection of Supermarkets. Proceedings of the 2019 2nd International Conference on Geoinformatics and Data Analysis. doi:10.1145/3318236.3318264Milot, J., Munroe, P., Beaudry, E., Grondin, F., & Bourdeau, G. (2016). Lookupia. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web - WWW ’16 Companion. doi:10.1145/2872518.2890485Ciepluch, B., Mooney, P., Jacob, R., & Winstanley, A. C. (2009). Using OpenStreetMap to deliver location-based environmental information in Ireland. SIGSPATIAL Special, 1(3), 17-22. doi:10.1145/1645424.1645428Del Pilar Salas-Zárate, M., López-López, E., Valencia-García, R., Aussenac-Gilles, N., Almela, Á., & Alor-Hernández, G. (2014). A study on LIWC categories for opinion mining in Spanish reviews. Journal of Information Science, 40(6), 749-760. doi:10.1177/0165551514547842Gambino, O. J., & Calvo, H. (2016). A Comparison Between Two Spanish Sentiment Lexicons in the Twitter Sentiment Analysis Task. Advances in Artificial Intelligence - IBERAMIA 2016, 127-138. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-47955-2_11Mooney, P., Corcoran, P., & Winstanley, A. C. (2010). Towards quality metrics for OpenStreetMap. Proceedings of the 18th SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems - GIS ’10. doi:10.1145/1869790.1869875El-Ashmawy, K. l. A. (2016). TESTING THE POSITIONAL ACCURACY OF OPENSTREETMAP DATA FOR MAPPING APPLICATIONS. Geodesy and cartography, 42(1), 25-30. doi:10.3846/20296991.2015.116049

Can Tourist Attractions Boost Other Activities Around? A Data Analysis through Social Networks

[EN] Promoting a tourist destination requires uncovering travel patterns and destination choices, identifying the profile of visitors and analyzing attitudes and preferences of visitors for the city. To this end, tourism-related data are an invaluable asset to understand tourism behaviour, obtain statistical records and support decision-making for business around tourism. In this work, we study the behaviour of tourists visiting top attractions of a city in relation to the tourist influx to restaurants around the attractions. We propose to undertake this analysis by retrieving information posted by visitors in a social network and using an open access map service to locate the tweets in a influence area of the city. Additionally, we present a pattern recognition based technique to differentiate visitors and locals from the collected data from the social network. We apply our study to the city of Valencia in Spain and Berlin in Germany. The results show that, while in Valencia the most frequented restaurants are located near top attractions of the city, in Berlin, it is usually the case that the most visited restaurants are far away from the relevant attractions of the city. The conclusions from this study can be very insightful for destination marketers.This work is supported by the Spanish MINECO project TIN2017-88476-C2-1-R.Bustamante, A.; Sebastiá Tarín, L.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E. (2019). Can Tourist Attractions Boost Other Activities Around? A Data Analysis through Social Networks. Sensors. 19(11):1-25. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19112612S1251911Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2017http://reports.weforum.org/travel-and-tourism-competitiveness-report-2017/OECD Datahttps://data.oecd.org/Travel &Tourism: Economic Impact 2019 Worldhttps://www.wttc.org/-/media/files/reports/economic-impact-research/regions-2019/world2019.pdfCohen, S. A., Prayag, G., & Moital, M. (2013). Consumer behaviour in tourism: Concepts, influences and opportunities. Current Issues in Tourism, 17(10), 872-909. doi:10.1080/13683500.2013.850064Yoo, C.-K., Yoon, D., & Park, E. (2018). Tourist motivation: an integral approach to destination choices. Tourism Review, 73(2), 169-185. doi:10.1108/tr-04-2017-0085Cohen, E. (1979). A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences. Sociology, 13(2), 179-201. doi:10.1177/003803857901300203Decrop, A., & Snelders, D. (2005). A grounded typology of vacation decision-making. Tourism Management, 26(2), 121-132. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2003.11.011Servidio, R., & Ruffolo, I. (2016). Exploring the relationship between emotions and memorable tourism experiences through narratives. Tourism Management Perspectives, 20, 151-160. doi:10.1016/j.tmp.2016.07.010Prayag, G., Hosany, S., Muskat, B., & Del Chiappa, G. (2016). Understanding the Relationships between Tourists’ Emotional Experiences, Perceived Overall Image, Satisfaction, and Intention to Recommend. Journal of Travel Research, 56(1), 41-54. doi:10.1177/0047287515620567Valls, J.-F., Sureda, J., & Valls-Tuñon, G. (2014). Attractiveness Analysis of European Tourist Cities. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 31(2), 178-194. doi:10.1080/10548408.2014.873310García-Palomares, J. C., Gutiérrez, J., & Mínguez, C. (2015). Identification of tourist hot spots based on social networks: A comparative analysis of European metropolises using photo-sharing services and GIS. Applied Geography, 63, 408-417. doi:10.1016/j.apgeog.2015.08.002Lu, Y., Wu, H., Liu, X., & Chen, P. (2019). TourSense: A Framework for Tourist Identification and Analytics Using Transport Data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 31(12), 2407-2422. doi:10.1109/tkde.2019.2894131Buhalis, D. (2000). Marketing the competitive destination of the future. Tourism Management, 21(1), 97-116. doi:10.1016/s0261-5177(99)00095-3Indicators for Measuring Competitiveness in Tourism: A Guidance Documenthttp://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k47t9q2t923-enLonghi, C., Titz, J.-B., & Viallis, L. (2014). Open Data: Challenges and Opportunities for the Tourism Industry. Tourism Management, Marketing, and Development, 57-76. doi:10.1057/9781137354358_4Open Data in Tourismhttps://www.europeandataportal.eu/en/highlights/open-data-tourismCox, C., Burgess, S., Sellitto, C., & Buultjens, J. (2009). The Role of User-Generated Content in Tourists’ Travel Planning Behavior. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 18(8), 743-764. doi:10.1080/19368620903235753Lu, W., & Stepchenkova, S. (2014). User-Generated Content as a Research Mode in Tourism and Hospitality Applications: Topics, Methods, and Software. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 24(2), 119-154. doi:10.1080/19368623.2014.907758Pantano, E., Priporas, C.-V., & Stylos, N. (2017). ‘You will like it!’ using open data to predict tourists’ response to a tourist attraction. Tourism Management, 60, 430-438. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2016.12.020Hawelka, B., Sitko, I., Beinat, E., Sobolevsky, S., Kazakopoulos, P., & Ratti, C. (2014). Geo-located Twitter as proxy for global mobility patterns. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 41(3), 260-271. doi:10.1080/15230406.2014.890072Girardin, F., Calabrese, F., Fiore, F. D., Ratti, C., & Blat, J. (2008). Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 7(4), 36-43. doi:10.1109/mprv.2008.71Alivand, M., & Hochmair, H. H. (2016). Spatiotemporal analysis of photo contribution patterns to Panoramio and Flickr. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 44(2), 170-184. doi:10.1080/15230406.2016.1211489Bassolas, A., Lenormand, M., Tugores, A., Gonçalves, B., & Ramasco, J. J. (2016). Touristic site attractiveness seen through Twitter. EPJ Data Science, 5(1). doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0073-5Mariani, M., Baggio, R., Fuchs, M., & Höepken, W. (2018). Business intelligence and big data in hospitality and tourism: a systematic literature review. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 30(12), 3514-3554. doi:10.1108/ijchm-07-2017-0461Francalanci, C., & Hussain, A. (2015). Discovering social influencers with network visualization: evidence from the tourism domain. Information Technology & Tourism, 16(1), 103-125. doi:10.1007/s40558-015-0030-3Williams, N. L., Inversini, A., Ferdinand, N., & Buhalis, D. (2017). Destination eWOM: A macro and meso network approach? Annals of Tourism Research, 64, 87-101. doi:10.1016/j.annals.2017.02.007Salas-Olmedo, M. H., Moya-Gómez, B., García-Palomares, J. C., & Gutiérrez, J. (2018). Tourists’ digital footprint in cities: Comparing Big Data sources. Tourism Management, 66, 13-25. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2017.11.001Padilla, J. J., Kavak, H., Lynch, C. J., Gore, R. J., & Diallo, S. Y. (2018). Temporal and spatiotemporal investigation of tourist attraction visit sentiment on Twitter. PLOS ONE, 13(6), e0198857. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0198857Maeda, T., Yoshida, M., Toriumi, F., & Ohashi, H. (2018). Extraction of Tourist Destinations and Comparative Analysis of Preferences Between Foreign Tourists and Domestic Tourists on the Basis of Geotagged Social Media Data. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 7(3), 99. doi:10.3390/ijgi7030099Wöber, K. W. (2003). Information supply in tourism management by marketing decision support systems. Tourism Management, 24(3), 241-255. doi:10.1016/s0261-5177(02)00071-7Sabou, M., Onder, I., Brasoveanu, A. M. P., & Scharl, A. (2016). Towards cross-domain data analytics in tourism: a linked data based approach. Information Technology & Tourism, 16(1), 71-101. doi:10.1007/s40558-015-0049-5Adamiak, C., Szyda, B., Dubownik, A., & García-Álvarez, D. (2019). Airbnb Offer in Spain—Spatial Analysis of the Pattern and Determinants of Its Distribution. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 8(3), 155. doi:10.3390/ijgi8030155Padron Municipal de Habitantes [Statistical Report: Residents in Valencia in 2018]https://bit.ly/2JnNNE

On the design of individual and group recommender systems for tourism

[EN] This paper presents a recommender system for tourism based on the tastes of the users, their demographic classification and the places they have visited in former trips. The system is able to offer recommendations for a single user or a group of users. The group recommendation is elicited out of the individual personal recommendations through the application of mechanisms such as aggregation and intersection. The elicitation mechanism is implemented as an extension of e-Tourism, a user-adapted tourism and leisure application whose main component is the Generalist Recommender System Kernel (GRSK), a domain-independent taxonomy-driven recommender system. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Partial support provided by Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2007–00022, Spanish Government Project MICINN TIN2008–06701-C03–01 and Valencian Government Project Prometeo 2008/051.García García, I.; Sebastiá Tarín, L.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E. (2011). On the design of individual and group recommender systems for tourism. Expert Systems with Applications. 38(6):7683-7692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2010.12.1437683769238

Experiencias Comparadas de la Asignatura de Introducción a la Programación en la Titulación de Geodesia y Cartografía

En esta ponencia se presenta un estudio comparativo sobre la asignatura de introducción a la programación que se imparte en el primer curso de la Ingeniería en Geodesia y Cartografía en dos universidades. En la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia esta asignatura se denomina “Informática Aplicada”, y en la Universidad de Extremadura “Fundamentos y Lenguajes Informáticos”. Se realiza un análisis de los temarios, del método de evaluación y de la utilidad de la materia enseñada para otras asignaturas de la titulación. El objetivo de este artículo es servir de referencia a docentes, que impartan alguna asignatura de introducción a la programación en una ingeniería no informática

Analysis of the effects of wet and dry seasons on a Mediterranean river basin: consequences for coastal waters and its quality management

Rivers play a major role in the delivery of nutrients to coastal ecosystems which are essential for ecosystem productivity. However, the increase of nutrients due to anthropogenic activities can cause eutrophication problems. This study analyzes the seasonal variation of phytoplankton communities in the coastal receiving waters of a Mediterranean river. Two scenarios are compared: the wet and the dry season with distinctive characteristics. During the wet season agricultural runoff and combined sewer overflows (CSO) were responsible for nutrient discharges, while during the dry season partially treated effluent from wastewater was the main nutrient source. In the receiving waters, diatoms typical seasonal cycle was modified by CSO discharges during rain episodes, while dinoflagellate abundance was higher in the dry season due to partially treated effluents discharges and low turbulence. We recommend that the design of the Water Framework Directive monitoring programs should take into account wastewater treatment plants and combined sewer systems located near the coast. Management decisions should take into account that only reductions in CSO and partially treated summer effluent are likely to be efficient in the short term. Analyzing the corrective measures cost through a cost-benefit analysis would help to determine whether the costs are excessive or not.Sebastiá Frasquet, MT.; Rodilla Alamá, M.; Falco Giaccaglia, SL.; Sanchís Blay, JA. (2013). Analysis of the effects of wet and dry seasons on a Mediterranean river basin: consequences for coastal waters and its quality management. Ocean and Coastal Management. 78(3):45-55. doi:10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2013.03.012S455578

Influence of nutrient inputs from a wetland dominated by agriculture on the phytoplankton community in a shallow harbour at the Spanish Mediterranean coast

[EN] The Safor Wetland (Western Mediterranean) is a protected ecosystem declared Site of Community Importance under the Habitats Directive. Agricultural practices have been part of this ecosystem throughout history, and its hydrology is anthropogenically manipulated to satisfy cultivation needs. Freshwater from the wetland is discharged through surface channels to Gandia Harbour, a shallow water body with high water residence time. This study evaluated the linear eutrophication gradient downstream from the freshwater inflow locations. The role of the main nutrients in determining the phytoplankton community is discussed. The predominance of agricultural practices, 48% of the watershed soil, caused an excess of nitrogen and an imbalance in the nutrient ratios at all the sampling points. Phosphorus concentrations were particularly low, and did not exceed 1.0 ¿M. Chlorophyll-a concentration was of the order of that found in other eutrophic estuarine waters. In general, flagellates dominated over diatoms at all the harbour sampling points and depths. Potentially blooming species of both phytoplankton groups were detected. The correct implementation of the existing agricultural best management practices should continue to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus loading to the estuary. It seems reasonable that for effective control of the eutrophication effects in this area, strict control over wastewater point sources should be also exercised. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.Sebastiá Frasquet, MT.; Rodilla Alamá, M.; Sanchís Blay, JA.; Altur Grau, VJ.; Gadea Pérez, MI.; Falco Giaccaglia, SL. (2012). Influence of nutrient inputs from a wetland dominated by agriculture on the phytoplankton community in a shallow harbour at the Spanish Mediterranean coast. AGRICULTURE ECOSYSTEMS & ENVIRONMENT. 152(3):10-20. doi:10.1016/j.agee.2012.02.006S1020152

Estimation of chlorophyll «A» on the Mediterranean coast using a QuickBird image

Remote sensing has proved a useful tool for monitoring and assessing water quality. However, little research has been conducted using satellite images with high spatial resolution to analyze coastal areas with high variability near shore. The objective of this research was to develop a model for estimating chlorophyll-a concentration on the Gandia coast (Western Mediterranean) by means of a high resolution QuickBird image. Several linear regressions were calculated to find the best chlorophyll-a model. The optimal model was found when blue and red bands were used. The retrieval accuracy (R2 ) was 0.92, while the root mean square (RMSE) was 0.34 mg/m3 . The selected model was validated with an independent data set and the estimation of chlorophyll-a was reasonably accurate (R2= 0.90). The results obtained in this study suggest that using a QuickBird sensor is an effective technique for monitoring the ecological status of coastal areas with an inherent high variability.La teledetección ha demostrado ser una herramienta útil para el monitoreo y la evaluación de la calidad del agua. Sin embargo, pocas investigaciones se han llevado a cabo utilizando imágenes de satélite con alta resolución espacial para analizar las zonas costeras con alta variabilidad cerca de la costa. El objetivo de esta investigación fue desarrollar un modelo para estimar la concentración de clorofila-a en la costa de Gandia (Mediterráneo occidental) por medio de una imagen de alta resolución QuickBird. Varias regresiones lineales se calcularon para encontrar el mejor modelo de clorofila- a. El modelo óptimo se obtuvo cuando se utilizaron las bandas 1 (azul) y 3 (rojo) con un valor del coeficiente de determinación (R2) de 0,92, mientras que el error medio cuadrático (RMSE) fue de 0,34 mg/m3. Se validó el modelo seleccionado mediante un conjunto de datos independientes obteniendo un valor de R2 de 0,90. Los resultados obtenidos en este estudio sugieren que el uso del sensor Quick-Bird puede ser una técnica eficaz para el seguimiento del estado ecológico de las zonas costeras con una alta variabilidad inherente.Sebastiá Frasquet, MT.; Estornell Cremades, J.; Rodilla Alamá, M.; Marti Gavila, J.; Falco Giaccaglia, SL. (2012). Estimation of chlorophyll «A» on the Mediterranean coast using a QuickBird image. Revista de Teledetección. (37):23-33. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/36141S23333

A Technical Solution to Allow Off-line Mobile Map Querying of Discrete and Continuous Geographic Attribute Data

In this article, a technique towards the generation of hybrid raster-attributes map for use in mobile devices is described. Our solution is based on coding the map attributes within an image using RGB values. The designed coding method enables the simultaneous storage of discrete thematic attributes and continuous quantitative attributes. This approach offers a wide range of possible uses. Small memory storage requirements and the simplicity of the software enable this coding method to be used efficiently in mobile devices without Internet connection. This article describes the basic fundamentals of the coding technique, as well as the operation and limitations regarding the volume of information. Two specific applications are presented: a topographic map used for recreational activities, and a visitor map of a university campus.Palomar-Vázquez, J.; Pardo Pascual, JE.; Sebastiá Tarín, L.; Recio Recio, JA. (2012). A Technical Solution to Allow Off-line Mobile Map Querying of Discrete and Continuous Geographic Attribute Data. Cartographic Journal. 49(2):143-152. doi:10.1179/1743277411Y.0000000029S14315249