Place: Room 621/622, GP South (Building 78)

Time: Thursday 24th August, 10:30 morning Tea, 11:00am seminar

Visiting Speaker - Rodolfo Baggio

Master in Economics and Tourism, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy School of Tourism, The University of Queensland, Australia

Topic: The Web Graph of a complex tourism system Tourism destinations behave as dynamic evolving complex systems. They embrace numerous actors and activities which are interdependent and whose interactions can be highly nonlinear. Traditional research in this field has looked after a linear approach: variables and relationships are monitored in order to forecast future outcomes with simplified models and to derive indications for management organisations. The limitations of this approach have become apparent in many cases, and several authors claim for a new and different attitude.

Whilst complex systems ideas are amongst the most promising interdisciplinary research themes emerged in the last few decades, very little has been done so far in the field of tourism.

A brief overview of the complexity framework as a means to understand structures, characteristics and relationships in this area will be presented.

As an example, the website network of a tourism destination is examined. The main statistical characteristics of the underlying graph are considered.

Although the topology of the network is similar to the one characterising similar systems, some differences are found, mainly due to the relatively poor connectivity among the vertices of the network. Implications as well as possible applications of the results will be discussed.

Rodolfo Baggio:

Holds a degree in Physics from the University of Milan, Italy.

He is presently a lecturer at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy) where he teaches courses in Computer Science and coordinates the Information and Communication Technologies area at the Master in Economics and Tourism.

After having worked for the IT industry, he is now involved in a number of educational and research projects on the relationships between IT and the travel and tourism sector and the analysis of tourism destination networks.

On this latter topic he is conducting a PhD research at the School of Tourism, The University of Queensland - Australia.