Association for Information Systems
	AIS Special Interest Group on CULTURE and TOURISM

12th Americas Conference on Information Systems Acapulco, México August 4-6, 2006

This mini-track is sponsored by the SIG CULTURE AND TOURISM

And by the OPEN TOURISM CONSORTIUM

Chairs :

· Emmanuel Monod, Paris Dauphine University(France) and Georgia State University (USA)

· Marie-Claude Boudreau, University of Georgia (USA)

· Marianna Sigala, University of the Aegean (Greece) m.sigala@aegean.gr

· Oleg Missikoff, LUISS University, Rome (Italy),

Call for papers

Tourism is a major contributor to the GDP of many countries. However, for some countries like Italy, Spain, France or Greece, cultural tourism is especially important, while very often cultural-heritage resources are placed at the centre of urban and rural development and rejuvenation strategies in many countries. Indeed, the European Commission published many reports recognizing the importance of cultural heritage as a distinctive economic asset for Europe. In one of these reports, IT is perceived as an enabler for reaping the benefits of its rich cultural heritage (Lisbon 2005, e-Europe, Information Society Technologies 6^th framework programme), both for an economic and interpretive perspective, especially in education and social interaction as well as at micro- and macro-level. Indeed, ICT adds value not only by digitizing operations of cultural institutions, but also by enabling the development, planning, promotion and management of cultural-heritage destinations with a sustainability focus. Unplanned development of cultural-heritage sites may lead to crucial threats (e.g. exceeding carrying capacity at heritage sites can be detrimental to artifacts as well as to the local’s community standards of life). Sustainability in terms of environmental, economic, socio-cultural and political perspectives becomes one of the most important issues to be achieved by authorities. To that end, cultural-heritage destination management systems can be exploited not only for measuring, controlling, directing tourism flows, but also for creating a baseline for a community tourism planning whereby local stakeholders recognize the high degree of interdependencies in planning and managing the tourism domain and promote their common interests. Indeed, locals’ and tourists’ participation in virtual communities’ interactions and online interpretations services do not only guarantee the balance of locals’ and tourists’ interests and the avoidance of any unwanted socio-cultural tourism impacts by it also ensures e-service quality and online visitor satisfaction (Sigala and Leslie, 2005).

This governmental position usually advocates for radical technology fostered infrastructural and organizational transformation in archaeology, cultural heritage institutions and policy makers like museums, archeological sites, tourism authorities and destination management companies. The most influential new technologies are currently ubiquitous computing, virtual environments, augmented reality, virtual reality and multimodality. There is currently an important development of mobile technologies and ubiquitous technologies under the commercial pressures of tourism (Watson, Monod, Akselsen and Pitt, 2004) One example of this movement is the Open Tourism Consortium that promotes ubiquitous mobile technologies and open systems for tourism. Ultimately, this would include ubiquitous ICT’s in the form of u-heritage systems (ubiquitous cultural heritage systems). At a macro level, state-of-the-art destination management and marketing systems are developed to include enhanced functionalities that aim to foster intelligent information interactions between tourists and locals (e.g. campiello.org). Nevertheless, such applications foster the development and emergence of digital cultural-heritage ecosystems, whose management and impacts on cultural tourism destination management and planning guarantee further in-depth research and exploration.

In this context, if Information Technologies (IT) have been experienced in the past for their transactional role, for instance ticketing, their contribution to the valorisation of the content is often extremely limited. For instance, an estimated 95% of all cultural heritage institutions in Europe are not in the position to participate in any kind of digital cultural heritage venture. They not only lack the financial resources to participate, but also have a shortage of staff, essential skills, and the necessary technologies. (Virtual Heritage, 2004) creating a deep digital divide amongst cultural-heritage institutions. This might appear extremely frustrating when, a growing number of Information and Communication Technologies may have an important contribution to the valorization of cultural heritage like mobile technologies, ubiquitous computing and networks, virtual reality technologies, hypermedia, data compression, data mining, OLAP or rich media.

This is why not only ICT but also Information Systems (IS) might play a key role in the evolution and transformation of the role and operations of cultural heritage institutions at a micro-scale as well as in developing, planning and managing cultural-heritage tourism destinations at a macro-scale. Rethinking processes like knowledge management, stakeholder analysis, content creation and management or customer relationship management might help to see the possible adaptation of the cultural heritage contents to market needs. IS also appear to include not only ICT and processes, but also organization transformation, project management, ontologies, policy making and change management. The track chairs are soliciting research papers, research-in-progress papers, methodological case studies, tutorials, comparative evaluations, literature reviews and panel proposals on the following topics:

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) :

· u-commerce in tourism (u-tourism)

· open systems in tourism and cultural heritage

· Mobile technologies in tourism and cultural heritage

· Personalization, individualization, Data mining, one-to-one marketing and cultural heritage

· Theoretical background for cultural heritage transformation

· Marketing of art and Information Technologies

· Virtual Reality and Cultural Heritage

· Cultural Heritage Information Systems

· Ontology and KM in culture

· Digital divide in cultural-heritage institutions and destinations

· Sustainable cultural-heritage tourism and IS

· Cultural tourism Destination Management and Marketing Systems (DMMS)

• E-learning in tourism and cultural heritage

Contact:

· Marianna Sigala, University of the Aegean (Greece) m.sigala@aegean.gr

AIS Special Interest Group on CULTURE, TOURISM and Information Systems

SIG Mission

The mission of the SIG e-Culture (e-Culture, e-Heritage and Cultural Heritage Information Systems) is to address the following needs:

· To provide a focal point for the debate of e-Culture, e-Heritage and Cultural Heritage Systems issues in IS research that currently is dispersed over many conference proceedings, journals, books and IS projects, especially in Europe.

· To strengthen the exchange of ideas and community ties between all the a actors of Cultural Heritage Systems, especially around the topics related to the use of innovation for supporting cultural institutions, scholars and users in producing, preserving and exploiting value in the Cultural Heritage sector.

· To promote the usage of Open Source Technologies in the domain of Cultural Heritage

SIG Committee

· Marie-Claude Boudreau, University of Georgia, USA

· Alessandro d’Atri, LUISS University, Rome, Italy

· Maurizzio Forte; ITABC – CNR, Rome, Italy

· Bernard Frischer, UCLA, USA

· Heinz Klein, State University of New York at Binghamton, USA

· Eph Mc Lean, Georgia State University, USA

· Karen Loch, Georgia State University, USA

· Marco de Marco, Universita Catholica, Milan, Italy

· Oleg Missikoff, LUISS University, Rome, Italy

· Marianna Sigala, University of the Aegean, Greece

· Detmar Straub, Georgia State University, USA

· Erica Wagner, Cornell University, USA

· Rick Watson, University of Georgia, USA

Contact Information

· Emmanuel Monod, Paris Dauphine University (CREPA) and Georgia State University, USA, emmanuel.monod@dauphine.fr

Background

“e-culture, u-tourism and virtual heritage” covers a wide range of research areas including :

· e-culture

· cultural heritage information systems,

· virtual heritage and digital heritage

· ubiquitous commerce applied to cultural heritage

· ubiquitous tourism

· mobile technologies applied to tourism and cultural heritage

· open systems in tourism and cultural heritage

· ubiquitous computing applied to tourism

· computer applications for archaeology.

These research areas basically discuss the relationship between Information Systems (IS) and tourism and cultural heritage institutions. Cultural heritage institutions include museums, archives, libraries and also archeological sites. IS included are especially ubiquitous commerce systems, open systems, mobile technologies and virtual reality.

Cultural Heritage (CH) Management in Europe, as well as in many other world areas, has recently been interested by a deep rethinking of its intrinsic essence. The socio-economic context in which CH institutions were created has dramatically changed, and the pressure for undergoing a substantial restructuring is constantly increasing. Such restructuring, in order to produce results, should indeed affect most aspects of CH institutions: from the mission itself to inner organisational configuration, from human resources to customer relationship management, from technological solutions to marketing and promotion. This phenomenon is generated by two key factors: (i) the need to raise financial resources independently from public funds, and (ii) the increasing request for high quality, value added, services from a more and more demanding cultural tourism. As an answer to these issues, the present contribution aims at providing a theoretical reference framework for supporting the formulation of general standardised requirements on e-culture, e-Heritage and Cultural Heritage Information Systems (CHS) development. A CHS is intended as an integration of organisational models and technological solutions, customised for providing the various categories of CH institutions with a support for designing a sustainable evolutionary roadmap and a management model for facing the new challenges. The final goal is represented by the transformation of cultural institutions in “state of art”, networked organisations, here defined as Cultural Service Providers (CSP).

The roadmap towards innovation will therefore proceed along three main streamlines:

1. Organisational models (designed for cultural institutions)

2. Technological solutions (for supporting innovation and management activities)

3. Knowledge management and dissemination (by means of Domain Ontologies)

The chosen approach is fully interdisciplinary and the epistemological basis ranges from studies on cybernetic , cultural economics and ontologies. An integration of contributions from these three fields of research, opportunely adapted to the characteristics of the CH domain, is proposed as a viable solution for the complex scenario outlined above.

Membership Information

To become an official member of the SIG, members will need to join the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and select to join SIG e-culture. The cost for joining the SIG e-culture is $10 per year.