Consider the following restricted (symmetric or asymmetric) traveling-salesman problem (TSP): given an initial ordering of the n cities and an integer k > 0, find a minimum-cost feasible tour, where a feasible tour is one in which city i precedes city j whenever j ≥ i+ k in the initial ordering. Balas (1996) has proposed a dynamic-programming algorithm that solves this problem in time linear in...

Mobile tourist guides shall help tourists to discover sights off the beaten tracks and therewith spread them over the destination more equally. Mobile information systems complement more traditional means of information provision, e.g. printed maps, guide booklets or simply signage at the destination. The most important question is: “How are mobile information systems accepted by ordinary touri...

Should poverty tourism be subject, on moral grounds, to specific policy constraints? This article responds to the question by testing poverty tourism against the ethical guideposts of compensation justice, participative justice, and recognition justice, and two case descriptions, favela tours in Rocinha and garbage dump tours in Mazatlan. It argues that the complexity of the social relationship...

The power of web services can only be realized when web services are utilized as building blocks to dynamically compose new web services. The Building Finder application is an example application that integrates information from several web services by modeling the web services as information sources in a mediator-based architecture. The paper also describes a mediator framework to dynamically ...

Chile’s Northern Patagonia attracts thousands of tourists, who every summer venture to undertake a range outdoor activities. In this article, we explore the local production activities, by conceptualizing small-scale nature-based tours as social practice. The study is based on empirical research, taking case development Marble Caves tour, an iconic destination in Patagonia, Chile. touring pract...

Nitpick is a counterexample generator for Isabelle/HOL that builds on Kodkod, a SAT-based firstorder relational model finder. Nitpick supports unbounded quantification, (co)inductive predicates and datatypes, and (co)recursive functions. Fundamentally a finite model finder, it approximates infinite types by finite subsets. Our experimental results on Isabelle theories and the TPTP library indic...

We develop an intelligent agent that builds a user model of a learner during a tour of a virtual world. The user model is based on the learner’s answers to questions during the tour. A dialogue model for a simulated instructor is tailored to the individual learner based upon this user model. We describe an evaluation to track system accuracy and user perceptions.