TiMatOnGIS: Revolutionizing Territorial Marketing via Crowdsourcing and Cloud-GIS

TL;DR

This paper presents TiMatOnGIS, a strategic approach to tourism in Matera, Italy, that bypasses traditional, slow-moving bureaucratic mapping. By leveraging Neogeography and Cloud-GIS, the authors demonstrate how a "bottom-up" collection of geographic data—powered by volunteers and mashed up with social media—creates a more agile and useful tourist information ecosystem than official national portals.

Contextual Positioning

In the landscape of territorial marketing, there is a massive gap between what agencies provide (paper guides) and what tourists want (real-time mobile data). The authors position this work as a shift from Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), which are often bogged down by bureaucracy (like the INSPIRE Directive), toward Cloud-based Neo-Geography, where the agility of the "Crowd" replaces the inertia of the "Institution."

The Problem: The "Static Information" Trap

Why do tourism agencies spend a fortune on printed brochures while Wikipedia remains incomplete and Google Maps lacks local cultural depth? The authors identify several pain points:

• Inefficiency of Official Portals: Many national tourism sites are either unfinished or overly complex.
• The Paper-Digital Divide: A surge in mobile usage is met with a lack of digital spatial data.
• High Maintenance Costs: Local authorities struggle to afford the servers and expertise required for professional-grade GIS.

Methodology: The Five-Phase Building Knowledge Process

Instead of viewing knowledge as a static product, the authors treat it as an incremental, cyclical process.

1. The 5 Ws of TiMatOnGIS

The project is structured around a clear communicative framework:

• What: A package of Web 2.0 and Cloud-computing tools.
• Who: A collaborative effort between the University of Basilicata researchers and "world citizens" (tourists and operators).
• Where/When: Ubiquitous access via the cloud—a "virtual information point" that never closes.
• Why: Driven by the belief that spatial data should be open and collaborative.

2. The Cloud-GIS Architecture

The core technical innovation lies in the Google Mash-up. By using GisCloud, the team didn't need to build a backend from scratch. They integrated:

• Base layers: Google Maps and National Geoportal data.
• Volunteered Layers: Points of Interest (POIs) mapped by students.
• Hyper-links: Deep integration with Wikipedia for history, Flickr for visuals, and YouTube for cinematic context.

Figure 1: The iterative cycle of acquisition, systematization, publication, integration, and sharing.

Experiments and Results: Mapping Matera’s Unique Identity

Matera is a unique UNESCO site, often used as a film set. The project prioritized "atypical" data that general maps often miss:

• Movie Locations: Specifically tracking where films like The Passion of the Christ or King David were shot.
• Modern Architecture: Including contemporary sites ignored by traditional historical guides.
• Multimodal Integration: Linking public transport routes with café and hotel locations.

Figure 2: Categorization of mapped tourist facilities and interest points.

The result is a High-Utility Mini-Portal. By using a blog (WordPress) as the interaction layer, the team achieved "Two-way Participation," allowing users to correct data and suggest new POIs, effectively keeping the dataset "alive."

Critical Insight & Conclusion

The true value of TiMatOnGIS is not just the map itself, but the Resource Optimization model it provides.

1. Lowering the Barrier: You don't need a PhD in Cartography to contribute to Google Earth or GisCloud. This "democratization of GIS" allows for massive data scaling.
2. Infrastructure Savings: Shifting to the Cloud removes the need for expensive local servers.
3. The "Enabler" Model: The authors argue that the future of public administration (Gov 2.0) is not just providing services, but creating the platforms where citizens can provide services for each other.

Limitations: While the project successfully builds a dataset, maintaining long-term volunteer motivation (beyond the initial "pilot" phase) remains a common challenge for crowdsourced initiatives. Future work should explore gamification or more formal integration into Matera’s official administrative workflows as it seeks the "European Capital of Culture" status.