Human-computer cloud for decision support in tourism: Approach and architecture

Tourism is one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing economic sectors, where on-the-fly information and decision support are more actual than ever. Tourist decision support systems today leverage a variety of technologies both machine-driven (GIS or knowledge-based inference) and human-driven (recommendation systems). This paper applies a novel concept of human-computer cloud as an architectural approach to building decision support systems in tourism (both from the tourist's perspective, and from destination management organization's perspective). This concept serves as a unifying basis for using human-based resources, allowing to virtualize them much like “ordinary” computing resources. Particularly, the paper identifies the list of typical decision support tasks in tourism domain, and then maps them to a multi-tiered conceptual architecture of cloud services. The proposed architecture is illustrated by the discussion of two scenarios - one for tourist perspective and one for destination management organization.