сhoosing tourism locations: personal verbal decision analysis supported by multimedi

Abstract

This paper examines how to support individual tourists in choosing locations/accommodation to visit during their stay in a locality. We show how this kind of decision making can be aided through a multi-stage verbal decision making process, including both formal and informal aspects, supported by an information system which can provide descriptions in both text and audio-visual form of the alternative under consideration at each stage of the process. The tourist decision-maker will need a structure in which he or she can express his or her initial preferences verbally. These will not be for named locations but, rather, for descriptions of aspects selected for detailed consideration. Thus we describe the provision of a generic preference structure of aspects on which the decision-maker can identify verbally expressed levels at which all the potential alternatives have been pre-classified. Since this generic structure is unlikely to contain classification information on all the aspects that an individual decision-maker may consider in the particular context, the system gives the decision maker the opportunity to explore particular alternatives (in multimedia where appropriate) to develop verbal descriptions of the levels on criteria which are personally relevant in deciding among alternatives.