The cultural heritage of a region, be it a highly visited one or not, is a formidable asset for the promotion of its tourism. In many places around the world, an important part of this cultural heritage has been catalogued by initiatives backed by governments and organisations. However, as of today, most of this data has been mostly unknown, or of difficult access, to the general public. In this paper, we present research that aims to leverage this data to promote tourism. Our first field of application focuses on the French Pyrenees. In order to achieve our goal, we worked on two fronts: (i) the ability to export this data from their original databases and data models to well-known open data platforms; and (ii) the proposition of an open-source algorithm and framework capable of recommending a sequence of cultural heritage points of interests (POIs) to be visited by tourists. This itinerary recommendation approach is original in many aspects: it not only considers the user preferences and popularity of POIs, but it also integrates different contextual information about the user as well as the relevance of specific sequences of POIs (strong links between POIs). The ability to export the cultural heritage data as open data and to recommend sequences of POIs are being integrated in a first prototype.

This paper presents a framework dedicated to the design of geographic web applications. This framework includes three generic design models that allow designers to build a geographic application according to three dimensions: geographic content, content rendering and display, and interactive behaviour. The three design models allow designers to develop applications for elementary tasks to achieve a specific goal. They are expressive enough to describe a wide variety of geographic applications. They are operational as they are translated into executable code. This executability supports an agile design process based on short cycles where designers can refine their needs as many times as necessary by specifying, executing and evaluating their application. Modeling is performed using visual languages. In particular, the interactive behaviour is specified with a language inspired from the UML sequence diagram. We have demonstrated that this language is sufficiently simple to be understood by domain experts (e.g., education, tourism, culture) with no computer science background. We have developed WINDMash, an authoring environment, to assess our approach, as well as the models and the design languages with a diversity of geographic Web applications. Cet article présente un cadre de conception d'applications Web géographiques interactives s'appuyant sur des modèles de conception génériques permettant d'élaborer une application selon trois dimensions : les con-tenus géographiques manipulés, la manière de les afficher mais aussi les comportements interactifs associés. Les modèles de conception proposés permettent de produire ces applications au service de tâches élémentaires nécessaires à la réalisation d'un objectif. Ces modèles se veulent riches pour être en mesure de décrire une grande variété d'applications tout en conservant la capacité à traduire leurs instances sous forme de code exécutable. L'exécution des modèles permet ainsi de proposer une approche de conception basée sur des cycles courts dans lesquels le concepteur affine ses besoins en enchaînant, autant de fois que nécessaire, des phases de spécification, d'exécution et d'évaluation de son application. Pour faciliter le processus de conception, le travail de spécification est réalisé de manière visuelle y compris la dimension interactive qui demeure la plus complexe à décrire et pour laquelle nous proposons un langage dédié inspiré du diagramme de séquence UML. Ce langage visuel se veut simple afin de pouvoir être appréhendé par des experts d'un domaine (enseignement, tourisme, culture.. .) n'ayant pas forcément des compétences fortes en informatique. Ce langage se veut également riche dans la description de l'interactivité. Pour mesurer l'apport de cette approche mais aussi des modèles et des langages de conception pro-posés, nous avons mis au point un environnement-auteur nommé WINDMash. Ce démonstrateur vise à mesurer l'expressivité des modèles définis en les expérimentant sur la conception d'applications géographiques variées. Il vise également à évaluer la pertinence de l'approche de conception et des outils de spécification visuels proposés.

Local cultural heritage document collections are characterized by contents strongly attached to a territory and its history. Our contribution aims at enhancing such a content retrieval process efficiently each time a query includes geographic criteria. We propose a core model for a formal representation of geographic information. It takes into account the characteristics of different expression modes: written language and captures of drawings, maps, photographs, etc. We have developed a prototype fully implementing geographic information extraction (IE) and geographic information retrieval (IR) processes. We approach geographic IE from semantic processings additionally to classic IE approaches. This paper focuses on IR and information visualization (IV) proposals relying on the geospatial characteristics of documents.