Traditional tourism data collection includes surveys, interviews and focus groups. However, these methods are both expensive and time consuming. Moreover, there is a lag between the time of data collection and the receipt of that data for analysis. Today, almost all individuals leave digital footprints on the Internet, which can also be used for tourism research. One type of digital footprint is the photos uploaded on websites such as Flickr. The aim of this study is to determine whether the digital footprints in Flickr provide a useful indicator for tourism demand. Photos tagged with "Austria" between 2007 and 2011 were collected using Flickr API. Residents were distinguished from tourists using the data, and spatial analyses were conducted of the tourist-generated data. The results indicate that geotagged photos in Austria are more representative of actual tourist numbers at the city level than at the regional level.

The advantages and positive effects of multiple coordinated views on search performance have been documented in several studies. This paper describes the implementation of multiple coordinated views within the Media Watch on Climate Change, a domain-specific news aggregation portal available at www.ecoresearch.net/climate that combines a portfolio of semantic services with a visual information exploration and retrieval interface. The system builds contextualized information spaces by enriching the content repository with geospatial, semantic and temporal annotations, and by applying semi-automated ontology learning to create a controlled vocabulary for structuring the stored information. Portlets visualize the different dimensions of the contextualized information spaces, providing the user with multiple views on the latest news media coverage. Context information facilitates access to complex datasets and helps users navigate large repositories of Web documents. Currently, the system synchronizes information landscapes, domain ontologies, geographic maps, tag clouds and just-in-time information retrieval agents that suggest similar topics and nearby locations.

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Highlights“Westeros Sentinel” – a visual analytics dashboard for Game of Thrones.Extraction of affective and factual knowledge from news and social media coverage.Emotional categories from semantic knowledge bases.Automated annotation services for contextualized information spaces.Interactive visualizations to explore context features.