Abstract:

In this work, we introduce "CT-Pel", an online platform aiming to support gaining insight into trends and sustainable perspectives of regional cultural tourism through data collection, analysis and visualization. Cultural tourism encompasses the activities of travelers who are motivated by their will to learn, discover, experience and engage with both the tangible and intangible cultural attractions found in a travel destination. Moreover, silver cultural tourism encompasses the emerging notion of “Silver Economy”, i.e., the redefinition of areas or economic interest due to the radically changing trend concerning ageing population. Cultural tourism can play a critical role in regional development in different world regions in the presence of a growing desire for cultural "experiences" as key components of memorable tourism experiences. However, the development and implementation of effective policies for cultural tourism as well as supporting digital tools and platforms remain a key challenge.

We address cultural tourism due to our country’s long historical past and rich cultural heritage also evidenced by the 18 monuments and sites in Greece already inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, four of which are located in the Peloponnese region. This is why we focus on the culturally important Peloponnese region, which is also the region hosting our university but has received poor attention in terms of discrete and effective cultural-tourism policies, so far.

In our work, which falls into the intersection of culture, tourism, and computer science & engineering, we exploit the interplay among culture, tourism, crowdsourcing systems, and decision-making mechanisms based on social choice aiming to support recommendation frameworks for policies related to cultural tourism in the Peloponnese region in Greece. In particular, we combine methods from Social Choice Theory (SCT), i.e., voting, and Information Visualization (InfoVis) techniques for building an online platform for data collection and visualization which can be used as a tool to support the investigation and evaluation of the current status of cultural and silver tourism in the Peloponnese region in Greece. To the best of our knowledge, no other platforms have been suggested either focusing on aspects of cultural tourism in the Peloponnese region or exploiting Social Choice Theory and InfoVis for studying and investigating issues on regional cultural tourism.

"CT-Pel" enables registered users to express their opinion on issues related to cultural tourism in the Peloponnese region in Greece via casting their votes for posted polls or via taking surveys. The platform administrator is responsible for posting polls and surveys. All visitors have access to a rich collection of visualizations for poll and survey results as well as access to statistics including participation and demographic details. In addition, poll results are also presented on an interactive regional map with a variety of available filters which enable visitors to focus on particular sub-regions, activities, time periods, etc. Collected anonymous data and generated visualizations are publicly available for downloading and further processing by interested individual visitors.

Keywords:

Cultural tourism, Peloponnese, crowdsourcing, Social Choice Theory, Voting Theory, collective decision making, democracy, InfoVis, online, responsive.