With the recent advances in Internet and mobile technologies, there are increasing demands for electronic access to tourist information systems for service coordination and process integration. Mobile computing and mobile devices are used to implement various tourist services (e.g. electronic tourist guides, digital interactive maps, and tourist e-commerce transactions). However, due to dispara...

This study aimed to explain tourist satisfaction by using an integrated model that incorporated cognitive and affective perspectives. Questionnaires data were collected from 385 participants in Tibet and the conceptual model was verified by using Structural Equation Modeling. The results showed that, from the cognitive viewpoint, the perception of the natural environment was the key factor to i...

This paper presents the development of the Tourist Guide, a location based tourist guide application for the outdoor environment. Our focus for this project is on software support for location based applications; we are not just interested in the location but also other elements of the user’s context, such as buildings in view, attractions and equipment near by, such as public telephones and to...

This article discusses tourist-activated networks as a concept to inform technological applications supporting dynamic bundling and en route recommendations. Empirical data were collected from travelers who visited a regional destination in the US and then analyzed with respect to its network stmcture. The results indicate that the tourist-activated network for the destination is rather sparse ...

Before traveling, tourists need to ensure that they will have a well-organized trip, which mainly involves a smooth flow of visits to different tourist attractions by themselves or following a pre-designed plan made by tourism service providers. The present study examined how the sequence of visiting tourist attractions influences tourist satisfaction at the expectation and experience levels. P...

Ph. D. thesis in Computer Science written by Montse Cuadros under the supervision of Dr. Llúıs Padró and Dr. German Rigau. The thesis defense was done on 22th November 2011 at the Computer Science Faculty of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The Doctoral Examination Committee was composed by Dr. Horacio Rodŕıguez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Prof. Dr. Piek Vossen (Vrije Unive...

1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, Via G. Di Biasio 43, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP) Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465 Porto, Portugal; E-Mail: [email protected] 3 Laboratory of Robotics and Systems in Engineering and Science (LA...

To those who help others. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor Prof. Nick Feamster, for all his support, enthusiasm, and optimism, which have been an invaluable source of inspiration for me. Nick has been a great mentor, who has had an incredible impact on my path. Also, I would like to thank Prof. Roberto Perdisci, for all his support, boundless positive energy, and persistenc...

With millions of people traveling to unfamiliar cities to spend holidays, travel recommendation becomes necessary to assist tourists in planning their trips more efficiently. Serving as a prerequisite to travel recommender systems, understanding tourist behavior patterns is therefore of great importance. Recently, geo-tagged photos on social media platforms like Flickr have provided a rich data...

We are developing a recommender system for tourist spots. The challenge ismainly to characterize tourist spotswhose features change dynamicallywith trends, events, season, and time of day. Our method uses a one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) to detect the regions of substantial activity near target spots on the basis of tweets and photographs that have been explicitly geotagged. A tweet ...