The scenario of the showcase is to develop a social software platform allowing the sharing of photos and travel stories that are integrated with photos (“photo stories”). This platform is not unlike the sites Flickr  and TripWolf , but distinguishes itself by providing a richer integration of content, support for different user roles, different perspectives on the content (photographer, traveller), customisability and personalisation (personal homepage, custom layouts and widgets), advanced search, etc.

In the scenario, we envision the following different roles, described in form of characters. Note that we will not necessarily support all these roles and functionalities in the final showcase implementation, the description just serves as a visionary setting.

Social media enhanced traveling

Szaby is going to travel to the Philippines. Still at home, he starts a new “trip” in the KiWi system. While he being on his trip, he takes many pictures with his digital camera. In some of the cities, he visits an Internet Café and directly uploads his photos onto the KiWi system. He also specifies the location where the pictures have been taken, quickly writes together the stories associated with the pictures, similar to a blog, and tags these items with tags that he considers relevant.

The KiWi system automatically makes suggestions based on the content of the text and based on taxonomies or ontologies stored in the knowledge base. Using the locations of the photos, the KiWi system can also automatically create a trip route that Szaby can share with his friends or with other travellers. He is also able to describe hotels and restaurants and rate them for other users. After the trip, Szaby returns home and wants to create a photo book out of this information. For this purpose, he refines the texts he has written during the trip and extracts the relevant content for a photo book that he assembles using a custom tool provided by the platform. He can order his photo book directly from the webpage.

Julia is going on a trip to the Philippines later this year, and wants to plan her route based on information on the KiWi system about things that are of interest to her. Since Szaby is on her list of friends in the KiWi system and has a quite high community equity ranking, the system automatically shows her Szaby’s recorded travel route, which she can copy into her own plan and modify according to her own interests.

In addition, the system automatically proposes additional places of interest in the area based on the tags that have been associated with pictures and stories. The system also provides a flexible, facetted search interface that allows her to add and remove search criteria that are suggested by the system, or manually add keywords. When Julia is finished with planning her route, she is able to let the system generate a printable personal travel guide for the route. She can also share her route with her friends and let them comment on it.

Sebastian is interested in photography, so instead of the role “traveller”, he accesses the system mainly in the role “photographer”. In this role, he is primarily interested in pictures and information about them, and not so much in travel route specifics, accommodation, etc. This time, he is looking for nice pictures of sunsets for a presentation he has to do. Using the search interface, he finds many pictures of sunsets taken by travellers and other users of the system, because they are tagged appropriately. Since he has both Szaby and Julia on his “friends” list, their pictures have a higher community equity for him and are thus ranked higher in the search results.

Obviously, this scenario is very ambitious and goes significantly beyond what current social software platforms do. While it is not the aim of the KiWi project to develop a fully-working travel and photo platform, we will as part of the showcase implement at least part of the described functionalities and demonstrate how they could be extended to actually reach the vision.

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