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Tourism is a multi-billion dollar international industry and also one of the biggest users of Web technologies, constantly adopting innovative ideas to enhance its market penetration. Tourism Informatics: Visual Travel Recommender Systems, Social Communities and User Interface Design provides cohesive...

Cellular Automata (CA) are a class of spatially and temporally discrete mathematical systems characterized by local interaction and synchronous dynamical evolution, which show complex behavior and are able to model biological phenomena. Cellular Automata and Complex Systems: Methods for Modeling...

Modern information and communication technology (ICT) systems can help us in building travel recommender systems and virtual tourism communities. Tourism ICT systems have come a long way from the early airline ticket booking systems. Travel recommender systems have emerged in recent years, facilitating...

This chapter proposes a semantic user model based on a description logic language to represent user’s knowledge and information, and a set of domain-dependent rules specific to the tourism domain in terms of spatial criteria (i.e., distance) and cognition to infer useful user features such as interests...

In the domain of travel and tourism, recommender systems have proven to be valuable tools for supporting potential customers during the decision making process. In contrast to other domains, however, travel recommendation systems must not only include extensive knowledge about catalogued items but also...

Nowadays travel and tourism Web sites store and offer a large volume of travel related information and services. Furthermore, this huge amount of information can be easily accessed using mobile devices, such as a phone with mobile Internet connection capability. However, this information can easily...

The term Web 2.0 was coined around 2004 and was used to describe more interactive types of websites developed after the dot-com crash. An important characteristic of Web 2.0 sites is premised on being able to incorporate various technologies and applications within the site to enhance functionality....

This chapter undertakes a ‘snapshot’ or glimpse into social aspects of tourism informatics with specific reference to the travel photographs posted on the social networking site ‘Facebook’. This analysis will focus on the travel images (photographs) generated by 10 individuals (five male and five...

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 influence in tourism, this chapter aims to examine the current state of virtual travel community (VTC) studies, and to offer an additional perspective of VTC, beyond the conventional research trends. The notion of virtual community includes a group of people who...

This research examines tourism behavior using Internet-based websites that provide free lodging with local residents. Increases in computing power and accessibility have led to novel e-tourism techniques and the users of such systems utilize an amalgamation of social networks, transportation networks...

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a model-based approach for automatic generation of usercentric interfaces for an individual mobile tourist. The generation of user-centric interfaces can provide a tourist with self-customized interfaces for efficient accessibility to mobile applications and...

Virtual reality environments are ever more going online. This trend, opened by videogames, will open new important opportunities to enhance cultural tourism, given the possibility of creating compelling virtual adventures set in the context of artistic and natural beauties. The authors are exploring...

In this chapter the authors describe an e-tourism environment that places emphasis on a community driven approach to foster a lively society of travelers. It enables them to exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just catch some interesting gossip. Moreover, business...

This chapter provides an overview of tourism ontology and how it can be used for developing e-tourism applications. The Semantic Web is the next generation Web; it uses background knowledge captured as an ontology and stored in machine-processable and interpretable form. Ontologies form the core of the...

Ever more frequently, contemporary science finds itself in situations in which the only way it can address the complexity of nature is to develop new methods. One of the most common models is the Cellular Automaton - a system in which large numbers of particles, distributed on a lattice, developing...

Cellular Automata (CAs) are discrete dynamic systems that exhibit chaotic behavior and self-organization and lend themselves to description in rigorous mathematical terms. The main aim of this chapter is to introduce CAs from a formal perspective. Ever since the work of von Neumann (1966), von Neumann...

What are the mechanisms underlying biological systems’ ability to transform themselves: the ability of structures to replicate for their own goals, or to meet the specific goals of the system or environment to which they belong? What kind of evolutionary process underlies the emergence of the simple...

There are two classes of problem in the study of Cellular Automata. The forward. problem is the problem of determining the properties of the system. Solutions often consist of finding quantities that are computable on a rules table and characterizing the behavior of the rule upon repeated iterations...

The concept of a cellular automaton derives from John von Neumann’s studies of the logic of life. In these studies, von Neumann focused on self-replicating structures with universal computational capabilities. Given the appropriate initial conditions, a universal computer can perform any finite...

The ingenuity of nature and the power of DNA have generated an infinite range of languages - including human language. The existence of these languages inspires us to design artificial cognitive systems whose dynamic interaction with the environment is grounded, at least to some extent, on the same...

Structural models and patterns are vitally important for human beings. From birth, we base our emotional and cognitive representations of the external world on species-specific signals (the human face) and exploit these signals to structure our instinctive behavior. The creation of cognitive patterns...

The basic mechanisms underlying development have long been a focus of attention for biological research. Development - or morphogenesis - involves a special sequence of transformations determined by a wide range of elementary processes. It is these processes - genetic regulation, changes in cell...

Our basic metaphor: in this chapter, we present a taxonomy of self-replicators - as if they were animals in a zoo. In the zoo, we play the role of an external observer (a zoologist) whose role is to describe the animals (artificial organisms) and their behavior. Different species reproduce in different...

It is widely recognized that the birth of modern science dates to the moment when Galileo first timed physical processes taking place in space. In biology, it is only recently that scientists have felt the need for experimental and mathematical methods describing the development of living organisms in...

In early 1950s, Iannis Xenakis became the first composer to use stochastic processes to generate pieces of music, working by hand. The first entirely computer-generated composition was Illiac.Suite.for.String.Quartett, realized by Lejaren Hiller in 1956 (Hiller, 1970, 1981). In Hiller’s approach, all...