CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of the Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal on
“Mobile and Pervasive Applications in Tourism”
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/pervasive-and-mobile-computing/

Scope:
The convergence of information technology, the Internet and telecommunication industry generated massive changes in the tourist industry. ICTs has been rapidly adopted by tourist businesses and authorities in a bid to gaining advantage over competitors. e-Tourism emerged as a promising revision of the previous business models and initiatives related to tourism, with the advent of web technologies. ‘Mobile tourism’ extended the notion of e-Tourism to meet the vision of tourist services provision to nomadic users with no spatial–temporal restrictions. The recent developments in mobile hardware and software allowed for the provision of a new range of personalized, context-aware services that were not previously feasible.
Further on, improvements in the area of mobile communications and networking have increased the availability of wireless bandwidth thereby providing new possibilities for exchanging and sharing data among tourists. Smartphones, mobile and wearable sensors, and other portable systems are commonly used to collect and exchange data as well as to infer personal, social and environmental context. Along this line, pervasive technologies open profound opportunities for the tourism industry and have the potential to revolutionize the tourist experience, delivering added-value services to tourists 'on the move'. However, before such applications can be widely deployed and used, several fundamental technical, social and business challenges need to be addressed.

The proposed SI aims at publishing outstanding articles describing innovative applications and frameworks that enable the use of mobile and pervasive technologies in tourism and outline the state of the art in this particularly promising area of research. We invite research papers as well as papers which address challenges in developing industrial-strength mobile and pervasive applications. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to:

- Novel context-aware applications in mobile/pervasive tourism
- Context reasoning and modeling in mobile/pervasive tourism
- Recommender systems in mobile/pervasive tourism
- Augmented and mixed reality applications in mobile tourism
- Pervasive games in tourism
- Novel edutainment applications in mobile/pervasive tourism
- Novel indoors mobile/pervasive tourist applications
- RFID/NFC-based mobile tourism applications
- Travel navigation and assistance applications
- Participatory sensing applications in tourism
- Crowd sourcing in mobile tourism
- Information sharing and social interaction in pervasive tourism
- User-generated content in mobile tourism
- Efficient algorithmic solutions in support of computationally-intensive mobile tourist applications
- Interactive surfaces and walls in support of tourist applications
- HCI issues and interaction models in mobile/pervasive tourist applications
- (Innovative) applications requirements, performance, and benchmarking
- Field trials, user acceptance and evaluation studies
- Security, privacy, fault-tolerance and resiliency in mobile and pervasive tourism


Guest Editors:
Damianos Gavalas
University of the Aegean, Greece
Email: dgavalas@aegean.gr

Maha El Choubassi
Intel Corporation
Research Scientist

Ángel García Crespo
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
acrespo@ia.uc3m.es

Paolo Bellavista
Università di Bologna, Italy
Email: paolo.bellavista@unibo.it

Important Dates:
Submission: extended to 5 February 2014
1st round notification: 15 April 2014
Expected publication: Last Quarter 2014

Submission Guidelines:
All submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors as published in the Journal website at http://www.ees.elsevier.com/pmc/.
Authors should select “SI: Tourism”, from the “Choose Article Type” pull-down menu during the submission process. All contributions must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. A submission based on one or more papers that appeared elsewhere has to comprise major value-added extensions over what appeared previously (at least 30% new material). Authors are requested to attach to the submitted paper their relevant, previously published articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.