• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.3-8
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• 2021

The growing literature on smart tourism and the increasing number of smart tourism initiatives demonstrate that the idea of smart tourism is captivating and that its potential is great. However, its concrete implementation so far has lacked the transformative focus called for by smart development principles. This paper suggests that conceptualizing smart tourism development as a utopian endeavor that requires critiquing the status quo and collective imagining of better tourism and good destinations could help smart tourism efforts transcend their instrumental, short-term, and fragmented character. It further introduces the concept of the Smart Tourism Mindset to propose that, as a utopian enterprise, smart tourism needs to be guided by specific values and traits that permeate actors at all levels. The paper concludes by calling for a greater focus on identifying what these values and traits are and how to best establish and communicate the Smart Tourism Mindset.

• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.21-32
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• 2022

This paper shows light on the concept of smart tourism destination as a future of tourism development, especially in the context of problems associated with developing countries. This study substantiates the case of smart tourism development in mountain destinations as an affordable and needed future of the contemporary era. This conceptual study is based on secondary literature on Smart Cities, Smart Tourism Destinations, and Tourism in Himachal Pradesh. The Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has been considered as a study area to acknowledge major tourism-related challenges, especially in mountain locations. Consequently, the dots are connected between existing challenges and solutions that smart tourism holds. It turns out that for the development of mountain tourism destinations such as Himachal Pradesh in the Indian Himalayas, investments in smart infrastructure are required. By developing smart infrastructure, a new USP can be made, a supportive environment for new local businesses, new employment opportunities, enhanced tourist experience and an overall raised standard of living for locals. Considering all factors, it leads to a highly competitive tourism destination. All tourism destinations located in the Himalayan mountains show somewhat the same tourism challenges as Himachal Pradesh, India. Therefore, this paper brightens the path of destination planners towards the development agenda of smart tourism destinations and shows how smart tourism infrastructure can be deployed for better management of tourism destinations.

• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.31-39
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• 2021

Smart tourism, a promising development trend for destinations, has drawn growing attention from practitioners and academics. Extant research has laid a solid theoretical foundation on the roles of technology and effects of smart tourism on tourists. However, little is known about structured and profound implications for a destination's smart tourism development. Thus, by selecting Hong Kong as a case city, this study proposes a framework of implications for smart tourism development. A qualitative approach was employed to gain insights from smart tourism stakeholders. Results shed light on nine elements that boost the smart tourism development of destinations. These nine elements serve as a significant reference for policy-making. Several theoretical and practical implications are provided for scholars, practitioners, and policy makers.

• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2021

Smart tourism research and development have mainly focused on the benefits of smart tourism technologies to certain stakeholders with transactional relationships in destinations. However, smart technologies in destinations could also cause several negative outcomes, leading to social, ethical, and moral issues. Such issues arise from the power imbalance between different stakeholders of smart tourism development. To mitigate the adverse effects of smart technologies, destinations need to enunciate the essential moral and ethical principles when developing smart tourism. Therefore, adopting descriptive and normative approaches to stakeholder theory, this paper proposes a framework to showcase several methods to address the issues.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.55-62
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• 2022

A smart tourism chatbot is needed as a user interface to efficiently provide smart tourism services such as recommended travel products, tourist information, my travel itinerary, and tour guide service to tourists. We have been developed a smart tourism app and a smart tourism information system that provide smart tourism services to tourists. We also developed a smart tourism chatbot service consisting of khaiii morpheme analyzer, rule-based intention classification, and tourism information knowledge base using Neo4j graph database. In this paper, we develop the Korean and English smart tourism Name Entity (NE) datasets required for the development of the NER model using the pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the smart tourism chatbot system. We create the tourism information NER datasets by collecting source data through smart tourism app, visitJeju web of Jeju Tourism Organization (JTO), and web search, and preprocessing it using Korean and English tourism information Name Entity dictionaries. We perform training on the KoBERT-CRF NER model using the developed Korean and English tourism information NER datasets. The weight-averaged precision, recall, and f1 scores are 0.94, 0.92 and 0.94 on Korean and English tourism information NER datasets.

• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.27-36
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• 2021

As a popular concept, smart tourism is widely used as a strategic tool to improve the competitiveness of world tourism destinations. Taking Macao as a case study, this research explores the relationship between government, academic research, and smart destination applications, with a view toward investigating the utilization of smart technology to achieve service innovation, effective communication with tourists, and enhance the travel experience. The study summarizes the current situation of smart tourism in Macao, finding that most of the smart services in Macao rely on users to obtain information spontaneously and do not achieve real interaction and service demand. Suggestions and advice for smart development are provided.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.45-52
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• 2020

Purpose: In the 4th industrial revolution, services that incorporate various smart technologies in the tourism sector have begun to gain popularity. Accordingly, academic discussions on smart tourism have also started to become active in various fields. Despite recent research, the definition of smart tourism is still ambiguous, and it is not easy to differentiate its scope or characteristics from traditional tourism concepts. Thus, this study aims to analyze the perception of smart tourism exposed online to identify the current point of smart tourism in Korea and present the research direction for conceptualizing smart tourism suitable for the domestic situation. Research design, data, and methodology: This study analyzes the perception of smart tourism exposed online based on 20,198 news data from portal sites over the past six years. Data on words used with smart tourism were collected from the leading portal sites Naver, Daum, and Google. Text mining techniques were applied to identify the social awareness status of smart tourism. Network analysis was used to visualize the results between words related to smart tourism, and CONCOR analysis was conducted to derive clusters formed by words having similarity. Results: As a result of keyword analysis, the frequency of words related to the development and construction of smart tourism areas was high. The analysis of the centrality of the connection between words showed that the frequency of keywords was similar, and that the words "smartphones" and "China" had relatively high connection centrality. The results of network analysis and CONCOR indicated that words were formed into eight groups including related technologies, promotion, globalization, service introduction, innovation, regional society, activation, and utilization guide. The overall results of data analysis showed that the development of smart tourism cities was a noticeable issue. Conclusions: This study is meaningful in that it clearly reflects the differences in the perception of smart tourism between online and research trends despite various efforts to develop smart tourism in Korea. In addition, this study highlights the need to understand smart tourism concepts and enhance academic discussions. It is expected that such academic discussions will contribute to improving the competitiveness of smart tourism research in Korea.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.347-354
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• 2023

The rapid development of information technology has accelerated the application of big data and the Internet of Things in various industries. Big data has a great potential in the development of smart tourism. With the help of innovation in emerging technologies such as big data and Internet of Things, smart tourism has a better possibility to surpass traditional tourism. Therefore, this article provides a theoretical support to this process. It has explored the innovative management model of big data and IoT in smart tourism and evaluate their effects on promoting tourism. It offers a reference for the integration and innovation of the tourism theory system. Before big data technology, the development of Internet boosted online tourism. However, tourism marketing is still inefficient due to a lack of understanding about tourists. After many practical explorations of big data technology, tourism websites begin to adopt big data technology in their daily operations. With the changes in tourists' preferences and needs, further innovation and research are needed to help smart tourism keep up with the changes in the market and create more competitive products and services. Innovation serves as the driving force for enterprises to occupy the market and develop.

• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.5-14
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• 2022

In recent years, UNWTO and academics have called for the development of responsible, sustainable, and universally accessible tourism to promote equal human rights and social inclusion. Prior studies have also revealed the potential and value of smart technologies in reducing, if not removing, barriers to people with access requirements during travel and in their everyday lives. However, a guiding framework of how smart technologies assist in building an accessible destination is still absent, thereby hindering the progress of building accessible tourism. This paper aims to fill this knowledge gap. A conceptual model of smart accessible destination (SAD) was proposed drawing from the intersection of accessible tourism and smart tourism. With the guidance of this conceptual model, tourism destinations and stakeholders can recognize and utilize the synergies of accessible and smart tourism to enhance the social inclusion, competitiveness, and sustainability of a destination.

• Informatization Policy
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.91-108
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• 2022

Keen attention has been directed at "smart tourism cities" due to its role of solving urban problems arising from modern tourism development. However, some local governments are making huge investments in developing uniform tourism apps without specific directions or guidelines for the transformation of smart tourism cities. Accordingly, this study aims to develop a standardized and objective smart tourism competitiveness index and evaluate the competitiveness rankings of various cities around the world. The index comprises the five subindices of attractiveness, accessibility, digitalization readiness, sustainability, and co-partnership. The analysis results have shown that Singapore is the most competitive smart tourism city, followed by Amsterdam, New York City, Seoul and Barcelona, with Ho Chi Minh and Bangkok being relegated to the bottom of competitiveness rankings. We expect that this index can be employed as a global standard for continuously and systematically monitoring smart tourism city-related projects in the future.