Capabilities : describing what services can do

The ability of agents and services to automatically locate and interact with unknown partners is a goal for both the semantic web and web services. This, \serendipitous interoperability", is hindered by the lack of an explicit means of describing what services (or agents) are able to do, that is, their capabilities. At present, informal descriptions of what services can do are found in \documentation" elements; or they are somehow encoded in operation names and signatures. We show, by ref- erence to existing service examples, how ambiguous and imprecise capa- bility descriptions hamper the attainment of automated interoperability goals in the open, global web environment. In this paper we propose a structured, machine readable description of capabilities, which may help to increase the recall and precision of service discovery mechanisms. Our capability description draws on previous work in capability and process modeling and allows the incorporation of external classi¯cation schemes. The capability description is presented as a conceptual meta model. The model supports conceptual queries and can be used as an extension to the DAML-S Service Pro¯le.

Destination Positioning Slogans - Analysis of Themes used by New Zealand Regional Tourism Organisations

A significant gap in the tourism and travel literature exists in the area of tourism destination branding. Although brands have been used as sources of differentiation in consumer goods markets for over a century, academic research attention towards destination branding has only been reported since the late 1990s. Three important components of the brand construct are brand identity, brand position and brand image. While interest in applications of brand theory to practise in tourism is increasing, there is a paucity of published research in the literature to guide destination marketing organisations (DMOs). In particular there have been few reported analyses of destination brand positioning slogans. The focus of this paper is on destination brand position slogans, which represent the interface between brand identity and brand image. Part of a wider investigation of DMO slogans worldwide, and in keeping with the conference location, the paper focuses on analysis of slogans used by New Zealand RTOs. The slogans are examined in terms of the extent to which they have been limited to ephemeral indifference. In other words, have they stood the test of time and do they effectively differentiate through a meaningful proposition? Analysis of the slogans indicates very few could be characterised as memorably distinctive. This reflects the complexity involved in capturing the essence of a multi-attributed destination in a succinct and focused positioning slogan, in a way that is both meaningful to the target audience and effectively differentiates the destination from competitors offering the same benefits.

Tourism Destination Preferences: A Longitudinal Analysis of Consumer Decision Sets

There have only been a small number of applications of consumer decision set theory to holiday destination choice, and these studies have tended to rely on a single cross sectional snapshot of research participants’ stated preferences. Very little has been reported on the relationship between stated destination preferences and actual travel, or changes in decision set composition over time. The paper presents a rare longitudinal examination of destination decision sets, in the context of short break holidays by car in Queensland, Australia. Two questionnaires were administered, three months apart. The first identified destination preferences while the second examined actual travel and revisited destination preferences. In relation to the conference theme, there was very little change in consumer preferences towards the competitive set of destinations over the three month period. A key implication for the destination of interest, which, in an attempt to change market perceptions, launched a new brand campaign during the period of the project, is that a long term investment in a consistent brand message will be required to change market perceptions. The results go some way to support the proposition that the positioning of a destination into a consumer’s decision set represents a source of competitive advantage.

Enhancing the trust of location acquisition systems for critical applications and location-based security services

This paper identifies a number of critical infrastructure applications that are reliant on location services from cooperative location technologies such as GPS and GSM. We show that these location technologies can be represented in a general location model, such that the model components can be used for vulnerability analysis. We perform a vulnerability analysis on these components of GSM and GPS location systems as well as a number of augmentations to these systems.