Prandi Catia, Nisi Valentina, Ribeiro Miguel, Nunes Nuno
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bologna, Italy.
ITI/LARSyS, Funchal, Portugal.
J Big Data. 2021;8(1):51. doi: 10.1186/s40537-021-00442-w. Epub 2021 Mar 24.
Tourism is one of the world's largest industries fundamentally arising from mobility as a form of capital. In destination islands that have a delicate ecosystem to maintain, this source of income can become problematic in terms of sustainability. A difficulty in making people aware of this issue is also represented by the fact that such sustainability-related issues (and their causes) are often not "visible" to citizens. To foster awareness about the relationship between sustainability and tourism in well-known destinations, we design a platform that engages users at two levels of participation: i. at the IoT and sensors level, in order to let them becoming providers of big data, deploying and enlarging the pervasive infrastructure; ii. at the (big) data visualization level, with the aim of engaging them in making sense of large volumes of data related to sustainability. This paper presents the design and implementation of a real-world experience where a low-cost collaborative platform made it possible to sense and visualize tourist flows and urban data into a rich interactive map-based visualization, open to the local communities. We deployed our case study in the Madeira archipelago, engaging locals and visitors of the island in two exploratory studies focused on measuring the impact of providing users with meaningful representations of tourism flows and related unperceivable aspects that affect the environmental sustainability. Analysing the findings of the two studies, we discuss the potentiality of using such a system to make sense of big data, fostering awareness about sustainability issues, and we point to future open challenges about citizens' participation in sensing and making sense of big data.
旅游业是全球最大的产业之一，从根本上源于作为一种资本形式的流动性。在那些需要维护脆弱生态系统的目的地岛屿上，这种收入来源在可持续性方面可能会成为问题。让人们意识到这个问题存在困难，这一事实还体现在与可持续性相关的问题（及其成因）往往对公民来说并不“明显”。为了提高知名旅游目的地居民对可持续性与旅游业之间关系的认识，我们设计了一个平台，让用户在两个参与层面上进行互动：一是在物联网和传感器层面，以便让他们成为大数据的提供者，部署并扩大普及性基础设施；二是在（大）数据可视化层面，目的是让他们参与理解与可持续性相关的大量数据。本文介绍了一次实际体验的设计与实施情况，在这次体验中，一个低成本的协作平台能够将游客流量和城市数据感知并可视化，呈现为一个丰富的基于地图的交互式可视化界面，并向当地社区开放。我们在马德拉群岛开展了案例研究，通过两项探索性研究让该岛的当地居民和游客参与进来，重点是衡量为用户提供有意义的旅游流量表示以及影响环境可持续性的相关难以察觉的方面所产生的影响。通过分析这两项研究的结果，我们讨论了使用这样一个系统来理解大数据、提高对可持续性问题认识的潜力，并指出了公民参与感知和理解大数据方面未来面临的开放性挑战。
