Access to historic environments for tourists with disabilities: a compromise?

Historic environments, the basis for heritage tourism, are difficult to access for people with disabilities. Many countries have introduced legislation to promote equal rights for people with disabilities. Historic environments, however, enjoy protection under national planning systems which limit the physical access improvements that can be made. The significance of historic environments for tourism in the UK is outlined. Barriers restricting tourists with disabilities accessing historic sites are reviewed from the heritage tourism service provider's viewpoint. Interests of the major stakeholders are considered in terms of the apparent conflict between conservation and access issues as heritage tourism service providers seek to comply with disability discrimination legislation. From a study of access improvements made by major heritage tourism service providers, good practice is identified. However, physical access improvements to enable tourists with disabilities to visit historic environments are a compromise because of the strength of conservation interests. Questions remain as to whether this compromise is acceptable to the tourist with disabilities and whether intellectual access is an acceptable substitute for physical presence.

Massive Science with VO and Grids

There is a growing need for massive computational resources for the analysis of new astronomical datasets. To tackle this problem, we present here our first steps towards marrying two new and emerging technologies; the Virtual Observatory (e.g, AstroGrid) and the computa- tional grid (e.g. TeraGrid, COSMOS etc.). We discuss the construction of VOTechBroker, which is a modular software tool designed to abstract the tasks of submission and management of a large number of compu- tational jobs to a distributed computer system. The broker will also interact with the AstroGrid workflow and MySpace environments. We discuss our planned usages of the VOTechBroker in computing a huge number of n–point correlation functions from the SDSS data and mas- sive model-fitting of millions of CMBfast models to WMAP data. We also discuss other applications including the determination of the XMM Cluster Survey selection function and the construction of new WMAP maps.