Marek Maurizio

End-User Development in Tourism Promotion for Small Towns

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a system for promoting small towns based on the mash-up of various data sources for personalized mobile access. The positive issues and the open problems are discussed and evaluated in the frame of an experiment made in a region in Northern Italy.

Manuzio: a model for digital annotated text and its query/programming language

More and more large repositories of texts which must be automatically processed represent their content through the use of descriptive markup languages. This method has been diffused by the availability of widely adopted standards like SGML and, later, XML, which made possible the definition of specific formats for many kinds of text, from literary texts (TEI) to web pages (XHTML). The markup approach has, however, several noteworthy shortcomings. First, we can encode easily only texts with a strict hierarchical structure while text has often concurrent hierarchies. Then, extra-textual information, like metadata or annotations, can be tied only to the same structure of the text and must be expressed as strings of the markup language. Third, queries and programs for the retrieval and processing of text must be expressed in terms of languages like XQuery [4], in which every document is represented as a tree of nodes; for this reason, in documents where parallel, overlapping structures exists, the complexity of XQuery programs becomes significantly higher.