An Approach to Enable Interoperability in Electronic Tourism Markets

The exchange of semantically consistent service descriptions is an important issue for flexible integration facilities for electronic commerce. Currently there is a lack of semantic consistency on the Web, burdening arbitrary market relationships. Several standardization initiatives have addressed this issue before, but nonetheless, the setup and maintenance costs have been too high. Furthermore, too rigorous standardization is not appropriate. As tourism markets are particularly heterogeneous, there is a high demand for flexible, but consistent data schemes for distributed service descriptions on the Web. A mediated tourism market could solve the integration problem by providing global data schemes that are individually extendable. In this paper we propose an approach based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Namespaces, which are promising technologies that could be used for addressing the interoperability issues, which remain, however, hard problems

On the uncertainty of interdisciplinarity measurements due to incomplete bibliographic data

The accuracy of interdisciplinarity measurements is directly related to the quality of the underlying bibliographic data. Existing indicators of interdisciplinarity are not capable of reflecting the inaccuracies introduced by incorrect and incomplete records because correct and complete bibliographic data can rarely be obtained. This is the case for the Rao–Stirling index, which cannot handle references that are not categorized into disciplinary fields. We introduce a method that addresses this problem. It extends the Rao–Stirling index to acknowledge missing data by calculating its interval of uncertainty using computational optimization. The evaluation of our method indicates that the uncertainty interval is not only useful for estimating the inaccuracy of interdisciplinarity measurements, but it also delivers slightly more accurate aggregated interdisciplinarity measurements than the Rao–Stirling index

Assisting Tourists on the Move- An Evaluation of Mobile Tourist Guides

The penetration of high-end mobile devices equipped with GPS and enhanced with multimedia features together with decreasing mobile data prices have resulted in larger usage of mobile services. One of the application domains particularly well-suited for mobile services is tourism, not least since tourists can be assisted especially during the vacation itself. Currently, there is a proliferation of such mobile tourist guides, proposing an unmanageable number of diverse functionalities. To counteract this situation, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, an evaluation framework is proposed, comprising both, a classification of mobile tourist services and a categorization of their delivery aspects in terms of several orthogonal dimensions. Second, on basis of this framework, four representative mobile tourist guides are evaluated, thereby demonstrating the frameworks ’ applicability. Third, several lessons learned are discussed, thereby shedding light on the current state of effort in the area of mobile tourist guides. 1

Personal infospheres

euzenat2010aInternational audienceSemantic web technologies are spreading to numerous applications: semantic desktop, semantic sensor networks, semantic web services, linked data, etc. The purpose of many of these applications is to collect data and to interpret them through interlinking

Editorial 2/2021: Digitaler Humanismus

In den letzten Jahren ergaben sich im Umfeld des Digitalen Humanismus Diskussionen zu Ethik und Medienethik, die sich u. a. im Wiener Manifest für Digitalen Humanismus niederschlugen, das aus philosophischer, informatischer und medienpädagogischer Sicht auf den Punkt bringt, welche Rollen und Funktionen digitalen Medien – im Guten wie im Schlechten – in unseren Gesellschaften zugeordnet werden

Digital humanism: The time is now

Digital humanism highlights the complex relationships between people, society, nature, and machines. It has been embraced by a growing community of individuals and groups who are setting directions that may change current paradigms. Here we focus on the initiatives generated by the Vienna Manifesto