Cityzen: a social platform for cultural heritage focused tourism

The way tourists organize their travels is evolving day after day. While in the past, information was more obtained by the support of tour operators, nowadays this is mainly obtained through the Internet. Among many options, on the Internet it is possible to get information about interesting things a place has and to make reservations. This new touristic paradigm brings attractive opportunities such as saving money and discovering unexploited information proposed by tourists that already have visited targeted places. But, it comes with a major shortcoming. Information on the Internet can be overwhelming and it can lead to a lot of time spent on planning a travel. Moreover, the Internet contains outdated and incorrect information which can cause incorrect travel planning. These issues can become even more preponderant when dealing with niche domains, such as cultural heritage, where the information is not pervasive. This paper presents the Cityzen platform for planning cultural heritage focused travels. This platform aims to provide a semantic web oriented data model that acts as central repository and which can be used by tourists for accurately and efficiently planning their sightseeing. This platform deals with cases of incorrect and incomplete information by using the social web as possibility of actively engage users in the information management while they explore the provided information.