A Framework of Knowledge Management

Systems for Tourism Crisis Management

1. Full Bibliographic Reference

Zhiyang Jiaa, Yiyin Shia, Yuan Jiab, Ding Lia “A Framework of Knowledge Management Systems for Tourism
Crisis Management”, 2012 International Workshop on Information and Electronics Engineering (IWIEE), Procedia
Engineering 29 (2012) 138 – 143, Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/procedia-
engineering/vol/29/suppl/C

2. Introduction: Objectives, Article Domain, Audience, Journal and Conceptual/Empirical

Classification
Crisis management is a problem solving process in which people involved retrieves information from
different aspects of causes and effects and collaboratively design a resolution to prevent the upcoming problems or
prepare for unforeseen phenomenon that could affect to a certain establishment. In this journal, an academic
framework of knowledge-management system for crisis management that supplements the decision-making
processes of the establishments, government or non-government, was developed. It is a combination of concepts of
artificial intelligence and web-based systems that could, extract, serve, and manage knowledge.
The journal is in broad scope of collaborating web-based technologies such as Database Management
System, Data mining and Knowledge Discovery, Information Retrieval Engines, Web development techniques, and
Document management system. The journal aims to support the local authorities and tourism organizations for
preventing unexpected scenarios or existing problems that may affect the tourism opportunities in their regions.
Tourism in different countries has difficulty on sustaining there economic growth due to unexpected
phenomena, for instance natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons, oil spoilage in reefs and seas, terrorist
attacks, infectious disease outbreaks, and many more. Authorities are creating resolutions for these problems but it
took them longer period of time due to numbered times of consultations and feasibility studies. Thus, the existing
problem could evolve and create another problem that can really contribute on economic downfall. Crisis
management is essential for tourism industry in order to circumvent or resolve if they encounter the aforementioned
incidents and these happenings exists repeatedly in different time and places. Therefore, a strong exchange of
information is vital for this matter in which tourism organizations and local authority must have access of these in
order to support their decision-making, designing action plans or resolution to the current problem.
The combination of artificial intelligence and web-based technology to create a knowledge-based system, a
framework developed by the authors of the journal, could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of creation and
sharing the knowledge among people. Identifying types of knowledge resources, the basic activities or procedures
influencing the management of knowledge, and how this knowledge can be efficiently integrated and applied by
tourism organizations at various stages of crisis circumstances, are some of the fundamentals of this system. The
journal defined one of the main tools of this system, extraction of different significant information, from previous
archives and documents up to the current phenomena, insights of experts and enthusiasts in different fields, designed
solutions in different context of problems. Since knowledge-based systems is defined as to derive new knowledge
from collected knowledge, the system may also address the concepts of reuse, sharing, training, and awareness to
users.
This conceptual study could be a significantly help establishments in tourism industry. It proposes a strong
collaboration and interaction of different tourism establishments, experts and enthusiasts of different fields, and
local authorities to manage crisis effectively and efficiently.

3. Very Brief Summary

Tourism industry in different in regions faces difficulty on deriving resolutions for unforeseen phenomena
or problems. Authorities resolves these problems in a longer period of time because of too much phase spent on
consultations and drafting of resolutions thus it causes another problem to up rise. Therefore, there should be an
efficient and effective way to exchange and interact with the appropriate experts and enthusiasts, and enough
accessible information to utilize for decision-making.
The authors developed a knowledge-based system, knowledge management system for tourism crisis
management, which could help tourism industry to design innovative and relative resolution for unforeseen
phenomena and upcoming expected problems. The system allows interaction of the authorities concerned in this
matter. Knowledge extraction, knowledge server, and knowledge manager are the main functions of the system. The

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 A Framework of Knowledge Management
Systems for Tourism Crisis Management

system can provide useful resources and decision-making supplements for the authorities to create the suitable
resolution to the existing problem and could forecast the linked problems.
Collaboration of artificial intelligence and web-based technologies are utilized to develop this system,
interaction through web could obviously fasten the interaction and exchange of information. Thus, authorities and
tourism industries could create proper and effective resolution for their concerns and could prevent shortcomings.
There are connective benefits if this system could be fully developed and well implemented.

4. Results
The authors of the journal abled to develop an academic framework for a knowledge-based system for
tourism industry, from internet data, raw data, rules, crisis management plans, these will be processed through the
knowledge extractor (e.g., data mining) and crisis management plan constructor and manager, then through
knowledge basis and crisis management plan repository that could result to relative information for search engines,
interpreters and plan tellers.

5. Class Readings
The article does not cite any class readings. Also, no class readings cite this article.

6. Contributions
This study proposes to develop a web-based knowledge management system for crisis management of the
tourism of the regions. The authors presented on how could the system help and assist the authorities on problem
solving. Tourism organizations and local authorities could interact and access information on the system to aware
other localities on their status quo, highly useful knowledge (such as government regulations, scenario planning
details and information on emergency and relief agencies) and some resolutions on their problems that could be
adopted by other regions with relative problems.
This knowledge management system that the authors developed could really contribute to the efficiency
and effectiveness of the authorities, government authorities and tourism industry managers, on managing the regions
with tourism opportunities. Since this is a knowledge-based system, this could create new knowledge from collected
identified knowledge and supplement on the decision-making processes of the concerned authorities.

7. Foundation
This study aims to develop a knowledge management system for crisis management for tourism. The
difficulty of knowledge transfer because of the compound of fragmented and heterogeneous information derived
from different resources of interrelated organizations creates an issue. In addition, “distributed nature of the
knowledge within each organization and among various organizations inhibits sharing of knowledge between
organizations.” (pg. 140) Thus, the development of pragmatic framework adopts the four factors that can identify the
appropriate knowledge management strategies: types of knowledge, source of knowledge, roles of managers and
plan knowledge for crisis.
Inputs for the framework are datasets of sets of rules in which this may contain any type of data, structure
data from experts, text/multimedia documents from repositories, pages extracted from web, rules that could be
expressed in different formats. These inputs could be used for knowledge extraction and knowledge engineering
processes that could be learned automatically.
Overall, the system results on giving supplementary information for decision making of the authorities for
creating resolutions and plans. Derivation of information may vary but acquiring of knowledge can be processed by
the system and could produce new knowledge.

8. Synthesis with Class Materials

There were no class materials for this section.

9. Analysis and Additional Analysis

After the article was published in the year 2012, the authors further continued this study and presented to
different research and journal conferences. “Evaluation of Chinese Online Tourism and Travel Service Providers
from the Users' Perspective” was presented at 2015 International Conference on Management, Education,

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Information and Control, where they evaluated different travel and tourism online service for product variety, price
comparison, customer reviews, customer service, and mobile App. Also, “User-Based Collaborative Filtering for
Tourist Attraction Recommendations” was presented to 2015 IEEE International Conference on Computational
Intelligence and Communication Technology, CICT 2015, in which they developed an online tourist attractions
recommender system that uses the information of the frequency of visits of the neighbors and used Cosine method to
filter and select the neighbors to be considered.
The development of this study gone further, “An Application of Knowledge Management System for
Tourism Regions” was presented at 2016 8th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and
Communication Networks (CICN), in which they presented the application this paper. The authors did a continuous
development in their study and created more appropriated research and development related to this study.
Moreover, there are plenty of concepts, theories, developed systems about knowledge-based system in
different fields, especially in medicine. There are several systems for medicine that could diagnose different illness
through image processing and other data extraction process. There are also systems that has artificial intelligence in
the field of business and finance. Trends on sales, stock exchange and some other aspects of business were
developed and helps establishments for their decision-making. Analytics and other tools to aid decision-making has
been rapidly innovating to suffice the needs of the businesses nowadays.
This study for crisis management is well-known, in the field of knowledge management and tourism, and
considered by other researchers and developers in other countries in which they want to improve the innovative
processes and economy of their tourism industry.

10. General Critique

Authors in this research developed a very helpful system, in academic framework, that could help the
tourism industry to upgrade its facilities and amenities, prepare from upcoming natural or unexpected circumstances
that could affect to the development and uprising economy of this industry. Knowledge-based system was the
foundation of the system that they developed, in which integration of different information technologies were used
to develop this framework, and will be deployed as a web-based system collaborated with artificial intelligence.
A knowledge-based system for crisis management for tourism industry could have a great impact to help
the establishments, organizations and authorities to manage the unexpected circumstances and resolve existing
problems through supporting their decision-making with relevant and significant information produced by the
system. It could be a great challenge for the authors to publish the system because of the variety of data, but since
they have resolve that issue through identifying the source, if the information is a tacit or explicit knowledge, roles
of the managers, and crisis plan knowledge. One of the issues that may exist is the performance of the system on
creating the output needed by the users, since there will be a huge number of information stored and finding the
most relevant and creating significant possible solution may take time and it should be fasten up in order to avoid
multiple commencement of problems caused by the existing problem.
If this study will be implemented there would be different issues, minor and major, especially on the
development and implementation. First, the complexity of information, input and output, could be a major issue in
implementing this. Tourism industries all over the world or all over the country has different perspectives,
interpretations, level of understanding and assessment of the situations. If this will be shared to other authorities
there could be conflict on dealing with the information drawn from the system. Theoretically, the system could do
the simplification of interpreting and presenting the information gathered but by reality there could be difficulty on
implementing this since the interpretation is done by a machine.
The idea of creating knowledge from the collected relevant knowledge and putting into a system and
implementing it into a web-based system to extend the feature of interaction and collaboration between industries
could give a greater impact. Interaction between users, managers or experts, is one of the attributes in knowledge
management system, in which the exchange of knowledge because of scarcity of other information/knowledge of the
other users can be fulfilled. Reliability of knowledge might rise an issue on this system since it is a web-based
system. If this system is limited to certain group of authorities with different functionalities in different users. Users
must be restricted on those information that they are bounded only. Editing and validating whether the information
is genuine or not should be done by experts and authorities.
“Knowledge management systems cannot be established without some development period. According to
Liebowitz J’s research, a progressive, two-year process to incorporate KMS into an organization is often a necessity,

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Systems for Tourism Crisis Management

and this also works to tourism destinations” (page 142). Thus, this system should be implemented as soon as
possible in order to aid the mentioned industry or there would be development or innovation on the process that
could shorten the time of implementation and increase the reliability of the knowledge. The longer length of time
could really increase the reliability of the knowledge that needs to be adopted by the recipients of the system.
The authors presented the benefits and the general processes of the knowledge-based system for crisis
management. There are some hanging parts observed but going to consideration that it is an academic framework.
Presentation of some details on how the data will be translated to users’ perspectives, what information will be given
to the users, and in what form of reports will the users receive to gather information from the system. Generally, the
author presented that there will be a Wiki and online bulletin board for users to view the current happening or
uploaded information that could be a great help

11. Further Critique of a Conceptual Article and Empirical Article

Academic framework for knowledge-based system for crisis management for tourism resolves the problem
of too much aftermath and cost of damage of possible disasters and unexpected problem. Authors present the main
idea of the framework and the integration of technologies, web-based technology and artificial intelligence. They
have shown different catastrophes and unexpected difficulties that could affect to the tourism industry’s economy
and also to the safety of the people around the area, tourists and residents. Thus, the development of this framework
could be a vital resolution for those problems to be resolved or prepare for upcoming problems.
Tourism industry authorities and experts in the field of IT are the main audience of this study, the authors
presented terms that can be easily understood by the main audience and technical terms are well explained. The
feasibility of this study is questionable, since this is an academic framework, the implementation and development
of the system might take time and could encounter different unexpected problems.
Furthermore, detailed framework for the translation of the information from different sources and users
down to processing of it, uniformity of information, and the types of useful data presentation that will be produced
to the end-users, however the authors presented that it will be done on Wikis and online bulletin boards but there no
further discussions about it.

12. Issues (listed by the author)

Some issues brought by the authors on their study are the following: (1) the uncertainty of the feasibility of
the framework in the perspective of quantitative research since it was designed for academic framework, and (2)
Complexity of the crisis situation and collaborative technologies. The KMS developed was theoretically capable of
doing decision-making support on crisis management by the tourism industries but it could be better if the
information, input and output, are numerical and quantifiable in order for the decision makers to have an accurate
and definite resolutions.
The feasibility of this paper could not be an issue in this study since this was bounded for academic
framework but this if this will be implemented the confidence of meeting its purpose could be questionable in terms
of quantitative research. Theoretically the paper is promising and could really help tourism industries to grow and
boost its economy. Since this was published last 2012 a lot of developments already implemented when it comes to
knowledge-management system and artificial intelligence. China’s and USA’s innovation and development of
system-generated diagnosis that could rapidly and accurately diagnose the disease that the patients has through
various imagery and information of diseases.
If this study will be implemented, there would be a great challenge on translating the information to the
users’ level of understanding. The paper presented that it will be translated through Wikis and online bulletin boards.
I propose that the system must produce a uniformed information that could satisfy the different understandings,
perspectives, languages, dialects, weight of cost and others alike. Wikis could be helpful for users in order for them
to be informed of various crisis happened from different places and they will be considering it and prepare if they
assess that it will someday happening in their locality.

13. Issues (in your opinion)

This study could really be a good help for the tourism industry but then there will be issues that will be
considered if this system will be implemented or theoretically the system could be capable enough to satisfy the
process in crisis management. On the academic framework, there will be an issue on the translating the information

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given from the source of the information into the users of that information. Different places has different
interpretation of the data, the system must produce a uniformity of information that will be given to the end users.

14. Impact
This article was cited on “An Application of Knowledge Management System for Tourism Regions”,
authored by the two authors of this study, Zhiyang Jia and Ding Li. They presented this at 2016 8th International
Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), in which the implementation of
this academic framework was developed into a web-based system. The authors made a continuation of this study
and developed other researches that could be great contribution on the development and improvement of Knowledge
Management and Tourism.
Another journal cited this study, “Impact of Knowledge Management inputs on Tourism Industry” authored
by Vijaya Kumar and Premchand Babu, in which they have discussed the effectiveness of knowledge management
in tourism industry in India, specifically in Tirupathi, with the aim to effective application of the knowledge
management and improve the innovative processes in tourism. This paper was presented in International Journal of
Research in Management in the year of 2015.

15. Questions
 Does the tourism industries really need to have a knowledge-based system for crisis management? Does
this system really helpful in terms of decision-making? Is it really for decision-making, why not consult to
residents of the local communities since they know region very well?
 If this system will be developed, does the existence of experts in the future will be possible? Is there a
development of knowledge of humanity if the technology could develop its known knowledge all by itself?
Is it really feasible to have a knowledge-based system for decision-making support? Does the reliability of
decisions of the authorities could be increased or practicable by the supporting knowledge of the system?
 Does the development of this system could really help the region, create jobs to the jobless and could create
many opportunities to the local communities? Does the system could invite more investors and increase the
economy of the region’s tourism industry?

16. Bibliography
1
Zhiyang Jia, Wei Gao, Weiwei Li. “Knowledge Management and Emerging Web-Based Technologies : A Review
and Prospectus,” Proceedings of the 2011 2nd International Conference on Information Technology and Scientific
Management, Tianjin, China, pp. 1111-1113, June 2011.
2
Maryam Alavi, Dorothy E. Leidner. “Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems: Conceptual
Foundations and Research Issues,” MIS Quarterly. Vol. 25, Iss. 1, pp. 107-136, 2001.
3
B. Stroetmann, and A. Aisenbrey, “Medical Knowledge Management in Healthcare Industry”, World Academy of
Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Health and Medical Engineering Vol:6, No:4, 2012.
[Online]. Available: https://waset.org/publication/Medical-Knowledge-Management-in-Healthcare-Industry/3008
4
Techwire Asia, “Medical diagnosis AI in Beijing beats real doctors”, July 3, 2018 . [Online]. Available:
https://techwireasia.com/2018/07/medical-diagnosis-ai-in-beijing-beats-real-doctors/
5
Zhiyang Jia, Ding Li, Wei Gao, “Evaluation of Chinese Online Tourism and Travel Service Providers from the
Users' Perspective”, 2015 International Conference on Management, Education, Information and Control, January
2015. [Online]. Available:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299967317_Evaluation_of_Chinese_Online_Tourism_and_Travel_Service
_Providers_from_the_Users%27_Perspective

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17. Citation Analysis Appendix

Zhiyang Jia, Ding Li, “An Application of Knowledge Management System for Tourism Regions”, 2016 8th
International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), page 375-379, 2016
. [Online] . Available: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-Application-of-Knowledge-Management-System-
for-Jia-Li/cd539d3aa7708c08769774c21a72bf7706dba096?tab=references

V.Vijaya Kumar, P.Premchand Babu, “Impact of Knowledge Management inputs on Tourism Industry”,
International Journal of Research in Management, Issue No. 5 Vol. 6 October-November 2015. [Online]. Available:
http://www.rspublication.com/ijrm/ijrm_index.htm

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