A Collaborative System for Environment and Tourism Information Authoring and Web Publishing: An Institutional Case Study

Abstract

Information intensive activities are usually carried out by heterogeneous work groups: collaboration is needed to reach a common goal that stems from different individual tasks such as data harvesting, aggregation and presentation, dealing with a large amount of highly fragmented information that could overload the working procedure nowadays adopted. Furthermore, the persons involved in such activities often operate from remote locations and in different times and are characterized by different skills and cultures. This requires that the workflow of the complete information cycle should be analysed to design the complex information system which can effectively support the diversified tasks fitting the requirements and habits of all the operators. A complex system can nowadays be developed by integrating already available components and by making them inter-operable. Environment heritage conservation and tourism promotion refer to a complex production chain where private companies and public institutions are involved with specific interests and skills. A relevant amount of the information needed and produced by their activities are referred to the territory, therefore is represented as geo-referenced data.