Analytic Hierarchy Process in an Inspection Evaluation of National Parks’ Websites: The Case Study of Greece
Abstract
Internet and websites, thanks to their popularity, are powerful tools than can be used to inform local society and the visitors on the role of the Protected Areas and National Parks, their ecological value, the restrictions for visitors, the ecotourism activities and contribute to informing and raising awareness. In order to evaluate and compare the websites of National Parks, an inspection evaluation experiment is presented. As a case study we have used the websites of National Parks in Greece, as Greece has rich biodiversity and a lot of tourists visiting the country during the summer. In order to process the results of the evaluation, we used a Multi Criteria Decision Making Theory, namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP has a formal way of quantifying the qualitative criteria of the alternatives and in this way removes the subjectivity of the results. The paper provides the basic steps of the experiment based on the advantages of the inspection methods and the steps of the AHP theory. The implementation of the particular experiment leads to conclusions about the electronic presence of National Parks in Greece.
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[2] Zacharoula, A., Koliouska, C., Lemonakis, C. and Zopounidis, C. 2015. National Forest Parks development through Internet technologies for economic perspectives. Operational Research, 15: 395–421. DOI: 10.1007/s12351-014-0147-8
[3] Büyüközkan, Gulci and, Da Ruan. 2007. Evaluating government websites based on a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making approach. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, 15(3): 321–343.
[4] Cao, M. Zhang, Q. and Seydel, J. 2005. B2C e-commerce web site quality: an empirical examination. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 105(5): 645–661.
[5] Chape, S., Harrison, J., Douglas Spalding, M. and Lysenko, I. 2005. Measuring the extent and effectiveness of protected areas as an indicator for meeting global biodiversity targets. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 360: 443-455.
[6] Davoli, P., Mazzoni, F. and Corradini, E. 2005. Quality Assessment of Cultural Web Sites with Fuzzy Operators. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 46(1): 44-57
[7] Dharmaratne, G. S., Yee Sang, F. and Walling, L. J. 2000. Tourism potentials for financing protected areas. Annals of Tourism Research, 27(3): 590-610. DOI 10.1016/S0160-7383(99)00109-7
[8] Di Blas, N., Guermand, M. P., Orsini, C. and Paolini, P. 2002. Evaluating the Features of Museum Websites. Museums and the Web 2002: Selected Papers from an International Conference (6th, Boston, MA, April 17-20).
[9] Doolin, B., Burgess, L. and Cooper, J. 2002. Evaluating the use of the web for tourism marketing: a case study from New Zealand. Tourism Management, 29(3): 458–468. DOI: 10.1016/S0261-5177(02)00014-6
[10] Garzotto, F., Matera, M. and Paolini, P. 1998. To use or not to use? Evaluating usability of museum web sites. Proceedings of Museums and the Web ’98, Toronto, Canada, 1998. Retrieved April 2016: Available at: http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw98/papers/garzotto/garzotto_paper.html
[11] Głąbiński, Z. 2015. Ecological awareness of tourists in the coastal areas of Poland - preliminary results of the survey. In: Szymańska, D. and Chodkowska-Miszczuk, J. editors, Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series, No. 28, Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University, pp. 53–68. DOI: 10.1515/bog-2015-0015
[12] Ho, C.-I. and Yi-Ling L. 2007. The development of an e-travel service quality scale. Tourism Management 28(6): 1434–1449.
[13] Kabassi, K. and Aristotelis M. A. 2017. Evaluating Thematic Museums’ Websites: The Case of Olive Museums. International Journal of Culture and Digital Tourism, accepted.
[14] Karoulis, A., Sylaioua, S. and White, M. 2006. Usability Evaluation of a Virtual Museum Interface. INFORMATICA, 17(3): 363–380.
[15] Lee, Y, and Kozar, K. A. 2006. Investigating the effect of website quality on e-business success: An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach. Decision Support Systems, 42: 1383-1401.
[16] Lewis, C. and Rieman, J. 1994. Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction. Boulder: University of Colorado, 1994.
[17] Lin, H.-F. 2010. An application of fuzzy AHP for evaluating course website quality. Computers & Education, 54: 877–888.
[18] Monistrol, R., Rovira, C. and Codina, L. 2006. Catalonia's museums websites: Analysis and evaluation proposal. Hipertext.Net, 4. Available at: https://www.upf.edu/hipertextnet/en/numero-4/museos.html
[19] Mostert, E. et al. 2018. A multi-criterion approach for prioritizing areas in urban ecosystems for active restoration following invasive plant control, Environmental Management, 62: 1150–1167 DOI 10.1007/s00267-018-1103-9
[20] Mulubrhan, F., Mokhtar, A.A. and Masdi, M. 2014. Comparative Analysis between Fuzzy and Traditional Analytical Hierarchy Process. MATEC Web of Conferences, 13
[21] Papageorgiou, K. and Kassioumis, K. 2005. The national park policy context in Greece: Park users’ perspectives of issues in park, administration. Journal for Nature Conservation, 13: 231—246.
[22] Puhakka, R., Pitkanen, K. and Siikamaki, P. 2017. The health and well-being impacts of protected areas in Finland. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 25(12): 1830-1847. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2016.1243696
[23] Reeves, T. C. 1993. Evaluating technology-based learning. In G.M. Piskurich (Ed.), The ASTD handbook of instructional technology. McGraw-Hill, New York. 15.1–15.32.
[24] Saaty, T. L. 1980. The analytic hierarchy process. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
[25] Saaty, T. and Gang, H. 1998 Ranking by Eigenvector versus Other Methods in the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Applied Mathematics Letters, 11(4): 121-125.
[26] Sebele, L. S. 2010. Community-based tourism ventures, benefits and challenges: Khama Rhino Sanctuary Trust, Central District, Botswana. Tourism Management, 31(1): 136-146.
[27] Sirah S., Mikhailov, L. and Keane, J. A. 2015. PriEsT: an interactive decision support tool to estimate priorities from pair-wise comparison judgments. International Transactions in Operational Research 22(2): 203–382.
[28] Strickland-Munro, J., Allison, H. E. and Moore, S. A. 2010. Using resilience concepts to investigate the impacts of protected area tourism on communities. Annals of Tourism Research, 37(2): 499-519.
[29] Tehrani, S. E.M., Norziha M.M. Z. and Takavar, T. 2014. Heuristic evaluation for Virtual Museum on smartphone, 2014 3rd International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr) 227–231.
[30] Tiwari, N. 2006. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to identify Performance Scenarios for Enterprise Application, The Computer Measurement Group, Measure It 4(3)
[31] Trakolis, D. 1983. The social role of national parks-Recreation and environmental education. Dasika Chronica, 5–6: 184–189, 209.
[32] Trakolis, D. 1988. National Parks in Greece: some recent developments. In Abstracts of the Proceedings of the International Conference on National Parks and the Protection of Nature in Southern Europe, p. 21. National Service of Parks, Reserves and Nature Protection, Faro, Portugal.
[33] Tsai, W.-H., Chou, W.-C. and Lai, C.-W. 2010. An effective evaluation model and improvement analysis for national park websites: A case study of Taiwan. Tourism Management, 31: 936–952. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2010.01.016
[34] Wu, I-C. and Chen, W.-S. 2013. Evaluating the E-Learning Platform from the Perspective of Knowledge Management: The AHP Approach. Journal of Library and Information Studies, 11(1): 1-24. DOI:https://doi.org/10.6182/jlis.2013.11(1).001
[35] Zhu, Υ. and Buchman, A. 2000. Evaluating and Selecting Web Sources as External Information Resources of a Data Warehouse, The Third International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE'00), 149-160. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/WISE.2002.1181652
Published
2019-11-03
How to Cite
KABASSI, Katerina; MARTINIS, Aristotelis; PAPADATOU, Athena.
Analytic Hierarchy Process in an Inspection Evaluation of National Parks’ Websites: The Case Study of Greece.
Journal of Environmental Management and Tourism, [S.l.], v. 10, n. 5, p. 956-966, nov. 2019.
ISSN 2068-7729.
Available at: <https://journals.aserspublishing.eu/jemt/article/view/3989>. Date accessed: 25 apr. 2024.
doi: https://doi.org/10.14505//jemt.v10.5(37).02.
Section
Article
Copyright© 2023 The Author(s). Published by ASERS Publishing 2023. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of CC-BY 4.0 license.