Crowd-cloud tourism, new approaches to territorial marketing

Abstract

Despite great efforts in adopting technologies for tourism development, few results have been achieved. A lot of experiences are mostly based on pilot projects or on never completed prototypes. Nations with a large tourism vocation lack of a serious national tourism portal. A different approach has been adopted in Matera (southern Italy), where a volunteered way has been adopted in mapping all tourist services and related information. All data related to cultural heritage, services, transport, etc. have been collected by voluntary actions of students and citizens and shared using cloud-gis web service. These data have been linked with other information already existing on the web (movies, pictures, Wikipedia, historical documentations, etc.), producing a sort of local mini-portal for tourism development. After this first phase a strong interaction with citizens has been created using a blog and social networks in order to complete and correct the whole dataset. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.