Tourist information on the STRABON website
The technical explanation of an editorial platform on the Mediterranean cultural tourism
Facing the economic and social issues of the tourism sector, the managers and persons in charge of the cultural and natural heritage have to communicate towards the professionals and the travelers. Concerned of preserving the sites, they are naturally registered in favor of the ethical and “sustainable” tourism, i.e. taking into consideration the long-term viability of the natural and cultural resources, and their equilibrium, as well as the integration of the activities in the local milieu.
The editorial tool placed at the disposal of specialists in the cultural heritage allowing the management of the documentary systems, the editorial chains, the information bases, the referential terminologies and metadata, the system has then to integrate the proper functions for the dialog with the economic sector of the local and international cultural tourism.
This theoretical analysis preceding the construction of the tourist information platform on the STRABON portal is completed by the production of guidelines to be put at the disposal of various users.
I - METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE EDITION AND PUBLICATION OF ONLINE TOURIST INFORMATION ON THE STRABON PORTAL
Objectives
To enhance the cultural heritage in the tourist development prospect is the announced objective in the terms and conditions of STRABON.
Tourist information, why ?
To answer the travelers’ expectations, through publishing cultural, educational, and social information texts, characterized by the respect of the identities and the social, natural, and cultural environment,
To meet the interests of local communities, whose activities tend to the increase the number of visitors and simultaneously the incomes generated by tourism within a heritage site,
To create partnerships on behalf of the managers of the heritage sites, with the operators, promoters of cultural tourism, public and private actors of the local development, the visitors flow management and the use of the infrastructures intended for public,
To establish virtual links and correspondences, among the sites, local initiatives and resources while stressing on the traditions, the authenticity, the originality, and the human activities directly related to the cultural heritage.
Actors
The approach and definition of a coherent group of information in the field of cultural tourism and its integration within a multilingual and multimedia production and edition of data regarding the heritage is necessarily based on various expertises :
specialists in the culture, economists and managers for the heritage,
opening a dialog with the decision makers and professionals of the tourism sector, experts, “tour operators”, local associations, regional tourism organizations, NGO’s in charge of the local development.
Conditions
The supervision of this development shall have to answer two main requirements :
Preserving the originality of each tourist site and the diversity of the particular cultural contexts,
Observing the rules and recommendations raised by the international organisms :
World Tourism Organization (WTO), UNESCO, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC),…
on the quality and the “sustainable” and “ethical” characteristic of the tourist experiments and activities,
on the protection, the presentation and the communication related to the public access to the patrimony sites within the framework of the “cultural tourism” activities
Means
The contents of the Work Package 11 (WP 11) is defined in the Technical Appendix 1 of the contract signed between the European Commission and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
The functions developed within the framework of the WP11 are the following :
Definition of the tourist services and the information products intended to professionals and for travelers,
Definition and matching of the data models for the tourist services,
Identification, collection and data processing on a specific software platform of cultural tourism,
Development of the information research tools, and online exchange for the operators and SME wishing to access online information,
Development of the online training and formation tools for the operators and SME eager to enrich the existing contents,
Integration of sustainable tourism indicators specific to the concerned areas and sites, and intended for professionals, decision makers and users concerned in the impact of tourism on the social, cultural and economic environment.
II - TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS OF THE STRABON INFORMATION PRODUCTION ON CULTURAL TOURISM
The definition of the technical specifications and the construction of the information production platform on cultural tourism were sub-contracted by the MSH to MONDECA Company, since December 2004. The work which started in January 2005 will be finalized at the launching of the general Strabon portal in the first half of 2006.
In response to the data processing problems, to the files and research edition for tourist information in relation with the considered cultural sites, the suggested solution integrates the existing components within the general architecture of the Strabon project associated with a specific tourism environment.
The components of the documentary system, already integrated in various local sites of Strabon, were taken into consideration and in particular :
OpenOffice files edition environment [1]
Files publication environment in the Strabon portal : Transfolio [2] and remote loading of the tools [3]
Tourism file consultation environment and the relations between the tourism files and the cultural files : Strabon portal [4]
The “tourism” environment hinges on the Intelligent Topic Manager (ITM) platform integrated in the Strabon architecture, and whose innovating approach is based on the use of ontology, thesaurus, and knowledge representation systems within the same tool. The superposition of these three dimensions is applied to the whole information and information data processing sequence : indexing, modeling, navigation and research, multi channel diffusion.
The “Tourism” solution components of Strabon are set as follows :
The thesaurus and information bases edition environment : ITM [5]
Metadata server for the indexing of the tourism contents ITM
Information or data server : ITM for the relations among the “Tourism” files, and for the relations between the “tourism” files and the “culture” files.
The ITM-Strabon platform thus allows the networking and the unification of the information. The linguistic components manage the referencing and the automated feed of the resources and information. The ITM functions guarantee a diffusion of the adapted resources to the various contexts in use.
III - PRINCIPLES OF MODELING THE TOURIST RESOURCES AND WORK SPACES
The Strabon portal must allow the development of the tourist resources in their context and their relationships with the cultural resources described in Strabon. The modeling is applied to the description of the types of the managed objects, their attributes, their semantic relations, and the linked constraints. It gives priority to the description of the tourist and cultural resources in their specific contexts, and to the links among the resources, in order to build an information system made up “of objects of cultural tourism”.
Thus do the choices of modeling applied to the tourist and cultural resources lie on the integration of :
the thesaurus of the World Tourism Organization, whose XML version Topic Map is imported in ITM, and which is currently in French and English version, and waiting for the Italian and Arabic version,
parts of the thesaurus of UNESCO, which are available in French and English, [6] and in accordance to an agreement for use requested from this organization,
these both thesaurus being run for the indexing of the contents according to a diagram available in four languages and described in the appendix attached to this article,
and of the ITM Tourism data base, unique for this project, and updated by the various teams of Strabon ; this base includes the denomination of the tourist or cultural resources, the identification of the file, and the semantic relationships to the resources.
This group of elements, thesaurus and information or data bases is managed in the form of an ontology. The model of ontology is carried out in respect with the current international standards, that is to say, the use of the W3 C OWL standard (Ontology Web Language). The Protected Open Source tool - University of Stanford [7] is implemented to design the ontology model specific to Strabon, a model which is based on the “Mondeca Publishing” ontology [8] .
Three workspaces are created :
A workspace for the “Ontology Modeling”, reserved for the ontology administrators (See supra),
A workspace “Terminology”, reserved in edition mode for the administrators of Tourism/Culture Terminology, and in reading mode for other users,
A workspace “Information Bases”, reserved in edition mode for the administrators of the Strabon Tourism Information base.
IV - FUNCTIONS OF THE ITM-STRABON PLATFORM
The developed functions are those of the work environment of professionals related to the management of the terminology and the data or information base.
The ONTOLOGY function and its components :
a) Ontology : Storage base of semantic graphs - compatible with standards RDF and Topic Maps ; b) Terminology - Thesaurus : Management of terminologies, thesaurus, tables of reference ; c) Information bases : Management of the trades subjects, names. Management of their names, attributes, and semantic relationships with other subjects and attached contents.
The BROWSING AND RESEARCH function and its components :
a) Browsing in the information base : the navigation in the information base through using the semantic relations between the subjects and access to the referred Strabon files ; b) Graphic visualization of the subjects and their relations, graphic charts of the resources and their relations - browsing through the information base via a graphic interface ; c) Multi-criterion Research : Multi-criterion research of the resources according to their attributes ; d) Semantic Research : The research on the resources according to their semantic relations.
The ADMINISTRATION - PARAMETER SETTING function and its components :
a) Modeling ontology : An integrated publishing software allowing the modeling of the ontology and its maintenance - Module for importing ontology models OWL (interface of protected imports). The modeling of ontology allows the description of : the types of managed resources, their descriptive attributes, and semantic relations according to the types of resource ; b) Imports – Integration of existing data : Imports of ontology modeling in OWL format - Import of terminologies, thesaurus, trade subjects, information and data bases, indexation data for contents… based on the structured files - Imports XML Topic Maps ; c) Users management : the management of the users profile, of the users, and their workspaces.
V - TECHNICAL INTEGRATION IN THE STRABON SYSTEM
The choices undertaken in agreement with the Strabon teams concerning the technical integration of the solution are as follows :
to re-use to the maximum the installed tools in “Strabon” to facilitate the users’ work,
to minimize the integration works among the Strabon tools and ITM, and thus, the project risk,
be in conformity with an open and interoperable architecture by placing an open tourism server, which is interoperable with the cultural contents, however independent in term of management and modeling.
Several levels of integration intervene successively :
The integration of the “Contents Indexation” : The files indexation is carried out while creating the contents in the OpenOffice environment. There is no technical integration since the selected terms in Strabon ontology for the indexation of the file are copied from the ontology and are stuck in the fields of the files indexation.
The integration “Access to the Tourism information base from the Strabon portal” : A dialog is established between the Strabon portal and the tourism information base in order to allow the portal to propose to the user tourist resources associated to a cultural file, and tourist or cultural resources associated to a tourist file. The portal will be able to question ITM via a “stateless” XML Web service regarding the tourist resources related to a cultural or tourist file. ITM will provide, in the shape of a XML TM file : a list of the tourist or cultural resources, the links among these tourist/cultural resources, and the identifiers of the tourist files attached in various languages. The portal will present this information and links, and the filtering of data according to the user’s language.
The Integration of “Graphic preparation of the Strabon Tourism portal” : The images in JPEG or GIF format are provided for the preparation of the Strabon Tourism portal.
APPENDIX : INDEXATION OF THE TOURIST CONTENTS
The indexation of the tourism files is made during the creation of the file in the OpenOffice editor environment, according to the diagram of the metadata defined by the Strabon project and described here below.
The “Keyword” field of indexation will be indicated by a controlled vocabulary resulting from the Tourism/Culture terminology in the ITM.
Each concept describes in the terminology framework, includes the name of the concept in 4 languages. The indexation is made for each language.
The installation of the term in the field is made manually according to the following procedure : ¨ research of the term in ITM ¨ copy of the term from ITM to the field of “keyword” indexation.
The indexation diagram of the Strabon documents ¨ Word : analyzed and tokenized field ¨ field : field string without analysis ¨ date : field containing a date (interrogation by possible terminals)
Fields :
text (word) : Default field of full text research
¨ strabon_locationtype (field) : Site of the file index (external, subportal, internal)
strabon_userid (field) : ID of the user having indexed the file
strabon_reference (field) : URL towards the resource
strabon_editorialtype (field) : Editorial type STRABON
language (field) : The language [ISO639-lang] of the resource text
Title (word) Title for free research
Title_(field) : Non analyzed titling, for lists of titles
subject_ (field) : Subject of the non analyzed document, with the language
label(field) : The label or short title
creator (word) : Author for free research
creator_ (field) : Author for posting of lists
keywords (field) : Keywords
keywords_(field) : Non analyzed keywords, for lists of keywords
period (field) : Temporal regrouping key
description (Word) : description for free research
description_ (field) : non analyzed description, for posting
publisher (field) : editor
date (date) : Date of creation
Type (field) : The type of the resource
format (field) : format
size (field) : resource size
Identify (field) : Identify
source (field) : Origin of the resource
relation (field) : Resource related to the current resource
illustration (field) : Illustrating image
coverage (field) : A displayable line indicating a place
chrono_start (date) : Chronological beginning of a period
chrono_end (date) : Chronological ending of a period
person (date) : Identification number of a person
toponym (word) : Controlled value indicating a place name
country (field) : The [ISO3166-country] code of the country
ufi (field) : Identification of a place according to a table of reference [GNS]
adm1 (field) : Identification of the higher administrative area - [GNS]
dsg (field) : Description of the type of localization by the UFI
utm (field) : Square UTM containing a place
tgn (field) : Identification of a place according to a table of reference [TGN]
longitude (field) : longitude
latitude (field) : latitude
rights (word) : copyright
License (field) : A URI pointing on the exact text of the license.
permission (word) : Granted permissions
audience (field) : List of authority
isPartOf (field) : File to which the resource belongs
[1] http://www.openoffice.org/
[2] http://transfolio.org/install_fr.html
[3] http://transfolio.org/transfolio-strabon.zip
[4] http://www.strabon.org/technologies/plateforme_technique.html
[5] http://www.mondeca.com/fr/technologie.htm
[6] http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/
[7] http://protege.stanford.edu/
[8] reference http://www.mondeca.com/system/publishing/
Program STRABON - http://www.strabon.org
