=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2412/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=TripMentor Project: Scope and Challenges
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-2412
|authors=Costas Vassilakis,Vassilis Poulopoulos,Manolis Wallace,Angeliki Antoniou,George Lepouras
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/smap/VassilakisPWAL19
}}
==TripMentor Project: Scope and Challenges==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/paper6.pdf
TripMentor Project: scope and challenges
Costas Vassilakis2[0000−0001−9940−1821] , Vassilis
1[0000−0003−1707−3153]
Poulopoulos , Manolis Wallace1[0000−0002−4629−5946] ,
2[0000−0002−3452−1168]
Angeliki Antoniou , and George
Lepouras2[0000−0001−6094−3308] ?
1
Knowledge and Uncertainty Research Laboratory
University of the Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece 221 31
{vacilos, wallace}@uop.gr
http://gav.uop.gr
2
University of the Peloponnese
Tripolis, Greece 221 31
{costas, angelant, gl}@uop.gr
Abstract. We present Tripmentor, a novel project, that is related to
tourism in the region of Attica. The project has as main scope to pro-
vide rich media content to tourists through a web and mobile environ-
ment in two languages trying to guide them through alternative routes
that include places of interest as well as organizations with offers to
tourists. The project interconnects people with places and events in an
automated manner trying to personalize on each tourist’s personality.
The challenges of the project are mainly technological as through the
processes of the project a) automated information about venues must be
collected, b) information about events related to venues must be fetched
and finally c) data related to system users and mainly their profile should
be discovered and created in order to offer a unique experience to each
of them. We present the scope of the project as well as the challenges of
its implementation.
Keywords: tripmentor, tourism, personalization, geodata, cultural re-
lated information, social media
1 Introduction
Attica is rich in cultural and recreational opportunities, but these are still inac-
cessible to its visitors, due to lack of knowledge of the Greek language in which
the content, events and places are mainly communicated and due to the un-
precedented amount of information about entertainment, artistic, cultural and
sporting events in the area. The history of Attica can be experienced at first
level through visits to archaeological sites and museums, but its wealth and im-
portance is highlighted through the semantic connection of points of interest
?
Cultural Informatics 2019, June 9, 2019, Larnaca, Cyprus. Copyright held by the
authors.
2 Vassilakis, Poulopoulos, Wallace, Antoniou and Lepouras
and activities with shared narrative. Existing sources of information either list
individual activities that can be undertaken by visitors, or offer predefined, in-
flexible guided tours, in which visitors can participate. The proposed platform /
application intends to fill the gap identified by the Strategic Tourism Promotion
Plan 2016-2020 of the Attica Region, producing immediate recommendations
tailored to the characteristics of every type of visitor.
This paper presents Tripmentor project, that concerns the development of a
bilingual service (English, Greek) in the form of a web-interactive platform and
mobile application that provides a personalized, integrated and unique travel
experience to the visitor of the Attica region. Alternative map routes are pro-
posed to the traveler connected to the app for recreational purposes, including
stops at the selected points of interest with real time information on cultural,
recreational and athletic events. Suggestions and related recreational proposals
match the travelers preferences (profile type), determined through a specific in-
ternal functionality of the platform, which combines information that the user
provides with user-related data extracted from social media. Each route includes
stops that have meaningful, cultural, chronological or thematic relevance to each
other, while the available time of the visitor is considered and co-examined with
the duration of the visit to each stop and the time needed to move between
stops, creating personalized narration- storytelling and incorporating gamifica-
tion elements, depending on the characteristics of the visitor and the weighting
of the user’s personal interests.
The objectives of the project are: a) personalization and personalized service
to the user-visitor, b) providing multi-level recommendations for a comprehen-
sive and holistic experience, c) ensuring the uniqueness of the experience gained,
d) offering a highly interactive and adaptable system, d) exploiting their sat-
isfaction visitors from the platform / application to promote it and ensure its
sustainability.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the project
in brief while section 3 describes the technological challenges of the project. The
next section depicts the challenges of the project and the paper finalizes with a
discussion.
2 Tripmentor Interactive Tourist Guide
To date, a variety of typologies and categorizations of tourists have been de-
veloped, which do not take into account that the associations and motives of
tourists are complex, nor that the conteporary tourists experience the journey
with a focus on new technologies and social media. In a level beyond the formu-
lation of modern typologies, on the one hand the role of the tourist narrative, as
a component of Experience Design, and on the other hand gaming and gamifica-
tion is emerging as an important driver for personalization and the uniqueness
of the experience that Tripmentor offers.
Correspondingly, techniques used so far to extract data from the profile of
social media users are limited, utilizing only a limited amount of the available
TripMentor Project: scope and challenges 3
Fig. 1: The Tripmentor project logo
data, while these data are not combined with data from third-party sources,,
while the techniques of extracting user profile profiles through games are in
experimental stage. Also, with regard to the configuration of the Point of Interest
/ events, existing web collection techniques are of a general nature and do not
merge information from scattered sources. Under the proposed action, research
is being carried out to develop further and to improve the existing tools in order
to specialize and respond to them needs of the project.
For foreigners, non having prior knowledge of the entertainment- artistic-
cultural- sporting ecosystem of the region and of Greece in general, and ac-
counting for the fact that the relevant information is mainly communicated in
Greek by the relevant media (websites, events in social media, etc.), it is almost
impossible for them to match their preferences with the numerous and varied
events offered in the Attica.
The Tripmentor platform aims to fill the gap of easy-to-access and systematic
touristic information availability, creating relevant narrative routes that fit to the
preferences (characteristics interests) of each visitor.
Three parties are involved in the project developments: a) Panteion Uni-
versity, Department of Communication, Media and Culture, which will develop
the rules and the theoretical framework for the typology of visitors (profiles,
preferences, etc.) and points of interest (history, culture, etc.), and match them
within appropriate storytelling gamification scenarios, b) the University of the
Peloponnese, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, which will
undertake the data mining process and the design development of a performant
platform software c) the company Geoapikonisis S.A.P.GE., a private company,
which will integrate the research results and individual software tools at the
Tripmentor platform.
3 Issues in technology
The project is built upon several different technologies due to the fact that a) it is
essential to collect data from several different sources, b) it is a large part of the
procedure to be able to collect direct and indirect data about the personalities
of the users and c) finally shall be able to interconnect logically and semantically
4 Vassilakis, Poulopoulos, Wallace, Antoniou and Lepouras
the collected and generated data in order to create a rich media environment for
the end users of the system. Figure 2 depicts the architecture of the system.
]
Fig. 2: System architecture
The system encompasses of different objects that cooperate and interact in
order to synthesize the final system experience. The object types are users, their
profile, places of interest and events. Finally, each venue is actively involved in the
procedures offering opportunities for rewards through gamification procedures.
3.1 Definition of the tourist’s typology
The categorization of tourists based on their interests, choices and behavior
at the visited venues proves to be particularly difficult in practice, as can be
seen from the large number of typologies that emerged, especially since 1970,
by psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists who tried to relate types of
tourists, incentives that drive them to travel and the types of tourism they
finally choose. However, the associations are complex and complex, while the
motivation is rarely ”one and only”, as it is usually an amalgam of needs and
desires, with the result that, especially during the last decade, we refer to ”multi-
engineers” tourists ([3], [5]).
In particular, the term “tourist incentives”, which form the basis for the for-
mation of a typology of tourists, means all those psychological and mental trends
that encourage people to visit a place in order to satisfy their tourist needs and
desires. These are social-psychological factors (social patterns, lifestyle, types of
TripMentor Project: scope and challenges 5
personality, mass media etc.), demographic (gender, age, marital status, edu-
cation etc), economic (income, , travel costs, etc.) as well as institutional and
organizational factors (development of the tourism sector in the country of origin,
institutional framework governing the country’s international relations, etc.).
Therefore, a modern typology is required, which takes into account the com-
plex ways of behavior that are encountered in the contemporary socio-economic
reality, especially for the tourists of the Attica Region. Given that there will
never be a typology that reflects the behavior of all tourists, what we are in-
terested in point to is that, in general, the interpretations that have often been
suggested for the motivation of tourists, lead to the conclusion that tourism al-
lows for escaping from an existing situation or facilitating the search for another
reality ([6]). Also, the fact that the experiences of each trip vary, leads to the
conclusion that particular attention should be given to the possibilities offered
by tourism to tourists to ”impress” different social roles or to strengthen their
social position through the social and and the social significance that tourists
themselves attach to their journey in relation to the social characteristics of their
”normal” life ([3], [4]). At this point, the role of storytelling and gamification is
key to creating a web-interactive platform / app that will provide a personalized,
unique and unique travel experience to the visitor of the Attica region.
3.2 Creating a database of cultural, sporting and recreational
capabilities
Database crawling techniques already exist based on crawling and analysis of
content sites, e.g. Scrapy, ABBYY InfoExtractor SDK. However, current ap-
proaches are of a general nature, with no focus on tourism / cultural activities,
and do not combine information from dispersed sources (eg websites, Facebook,
Twitter, TripAdvisor), which would enable the composition of a complete pic-
ture of the activities, opportunities but also the opinion of the community. To
this end, we will develop specialized models for tourism and cultural activities,
as well as techniques for synthesizing information from different sources. At the
same time, based on the metadata created by the process of collecting and pro-
cessing, a categorization of points of interest from clustering algorithms (eg,
agglomerative, k-means) will be performed and existing software libraries (eg
hierarchical agglomeration clustering). As a result, a database of cultural, sport-
ing and recreational capabilities will be created that will contain reliable and
up-to-date information that will incorporate the views of the public and be ap-
propriate for making recommendations to users. For non-tourist sites, interactive
web-based sources will be mapped.
3.3 Gamification procedures
The platform will be used to:
– create a user profile
– advertise and promote a tourist product (mainly to social networks) and
6 Vassilakis, Poulopoulos, Wallace, Antoniou and Lepouras
– deliver the user experience in an extended and more appealing fashion
With regard to gamification elements, techniques for extracting user profile pro-
files through games are already only at an experimental stage, and through the
proposed action will be extended and implemented on a large scale. Advert games
are already in use, but their use under the proposed action will be combined with
their targeted configuration and the recommendation for users to use according
to their profile. Finally, although gamification has already been applied in the
tourism sector [2], the same does not apply for the extensive gaming of the expe-
rience, the proposed action will also innovate in this direction, while introducing
the additional feature of customizing the degree of gamification according to the
user profile.
3.4 User profiling from Social Media
Most online users today have an account at least one major social network. In
social networks, users maintain their profile, from which we can extract use-
ful data, including interests and social relationships, which we can use in the
TripMentor project to make recommendations and generally adapt the content
provided to users.
Under the proposed action, user profile data will be exploited outside of the
social network that is published along with the typology of visitors and will
be processed to identify latent factors that lead user preferences and choices for
further refinement and extension of standardization through the already existing
know-how of the University of Peloponnese ( [7], [8]), in conjunction with log
libraries (eg, matrix factorization library).
4 Project challenges
The challenges of the project derive from the accomplishment of its main goals:
– Personalization and personalized service
– Multilevel recommendations for achieving holistic experience
– Uniqueness of experience
– Direct communication and interaction with the visitor
– Leveraging user satisfaction
By trying to accomplish the aforementioned the project, it is obvious that
the challenges of the project are related to the take up of the system by the
users and to the ability of the system to adapt on each of them. The following
paragraphs describe how each challenge is expected to be faced.
In order to achieve personalization on the end-users and provision of per-
sonalized services the system is categorizing the visitors’ profile based on his
Facebook, or generally social media, profile. Furthermore the user can provide
information about her profile by completing a simple questionnaire. This cat-
egorization is continuously updated based on activities offered in the region of
TripMentor Project: scope and challenges 7
Attica. It is of great importance capture the users’ profiles accurately and exploit
them as effectively as possible, generating successful and appropriate recommen-
dations.
The system shall offer a holistic experience to the end users in order to dif-
ferentiate from alternatives offered. In this scope the system creates multilevel
recommendations for the users based on all activities offered in the area including
cultural events, museums, archaeological sites, sports activities, walking tourism
- urban and urban, entertainment and nightlife. Furthermore, the system is en-
hanced with three alternative routes, with specific stops at proposed points of
interest / events, with information on the best time spent, the optimal way of
traveling (public transport / taxi / car), the cost of travel and the total duration
of the journey. In this way, the experience becomes complete and holistic.
A crucial issue for the system is that it can be impersonal to the end users.
This can be tackled by offering the possibility of communication at any time.
This issue is also alleviated with the usage of the online platform and the mo-
bile application both including real-time results. Furthermore, the gamification
mechanism, that accompanies the user throughout the journey and rewards him
when he communicates his presence to the proposed stops both on the platform
and on other social media, is a means of keeping the user alert and engaged.
It is important to enable the users rate their experience as well as share it. It
is expected that a rating system for the provided services can be beneficial for
both the platform and its users. Generally, the participation of the user can be
expressed by communicating the presence of the user to the recommended venues
that significantly contribute to the visibility of the platform to new potential
users, by creating a community of users with the ability to comment, record
experience on the route as a whole, and for each proposed stop, and by publishing
Platform Efficiency Indicators for Points of Interest, which will be valuable for
entering into trade agreements.
5 Discussion
In this paper, we presented the scope, and challenges of the Tripmentor project
as well as the technological aspects of its implementation. The project intends
to provide a novel approach to the experience of tourists in the region of Attica
involving the organizations to the procedures of achieving it.
As the personalized tourist services market is continuously growing to accom-
modate new products and services, and since there is no similar web platform
/ application offering personalized recommendations to Attica visitors based on
their personal preferences with a single narrative context, the service proposi-
tion of the TripMentor project is going to cover the real need to match visitor
preferences with the available options and to give great impetus to the visitor’s
day. The increase in the number of tourists, with a prolongation of the tourist
season and the emergence of Attica as a city break destination, are objectives of
the prefecture of Attica under the Strategic Tourism Promotion Plan 2016-2020,
to which the platform / application can contribute.
8 Vassilakis, Poulopoulos, Wallace, Antoniou and Lepouras
Tripmentor will help (a) increase the sales of businesses and organizations
in the region, (b) maintain jobs throughout the year, and (c) to enhance the
competitiveness of the Attica economy at international level by i) increasing
/ improving the visibility on the internet and the recognition of the organiza-
tions and businesses in the region that are active in the provision of cultural,
recreational and tourist services; ii) the increase in consumption of the tourist,
artistic, recreational products of the region as well as products from other sectors
linked to tourism; and (iii) the diffusion of visitors throughout the territory of
the As Attica, either they make a short vacation at in Attica, Attica or incorpo-
rate as part of their holiday in Greece. At the same time, both the research and
the implementation of TripMentor will contribute to the production of knowl-
edge and systematization of the already existing information. Significant benefits
can arise from the emergence of new points of interest in Attica, the systematic
recording, categorization and historical-geographic-sense-narrative connection,
the thorough study and formation of the specialized typology of visitors to At-
tica and its correspondence with the points of interest, and finally the emotional
involvement of visitors with the place and the recording of their degree of satis-
faction.
Acknowledgment
This research has been cofinanced by the European Union and Greek national
funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and
Innovation, under the call RESEARCH CREATE INNOVATE (project code:
T1EDK - 03874)
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