Search Results (5,903)

The digital transformation of cultural tourism has increased interest in understanding how technological innovation and sustainability influence destination choice among younger travellers. Grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study examines the relationship between Smart Technologies, Sustainability, and Generation Z’s intention to visit digitally enhanced cultural destinations. Data were collected from 354 Generation Z respondents and analysed using SmartPLS4, complemented by mediation analysis, Importance–Performance Map Analysis, PLSpredict, and the Cross-Validated Predictive Ability Test. The findings reveal that Smart Technologies exert a strong positive effect on Visit Intention (β = 0.575, p < 0.001) and Sustainability (β = 0.437, p < 0.001), while Sustainability also positively influences Visit Intention (β = 0.194, p < 0.001). Sustainability partially mediates the relationship between Smart Technologies and Visit Intention (β = 0.085, p < 0.001). The model explains 46.6% of the variance in Visit Intention, while IPMA identifies Smart Technologies as the most influential managerial priority. The study contributes to smart tourism literature by providing an integrated TPB-based framework linking technology, sustainability, and destination intention. The findings suggest that technological innovation is the primary driver of Visit Intention, while Sustainability plays a complementary role among Generation Z travellers. Full article

Digital twins are becoming vital decision-making infrastructures across critical infrastructure sectors such as smart city urban services, transportation, energy, and healthcare. As digital twins become autonomous and gain real-time intervention capabilities, their governance becomes increasingly essential. Yet existing governance mechanisms remain largely procedural: they emphasize compliance without operationalizing the cognitive practices required to question assumptions, detect algorithmic harms, or support legitimate multi-actor deliberation. Drawing on a systematic scoping review, this study synthesizes the literature on digital twin autonomy, algorithmic risks, epistemic foundations, and governance mechanisms. The review reveals a fundamental gap: current governance mechanisms lack institutionalized cognitive capacities for continuous validation, proactive detection of emerging harms, and structured multi-stakeholder deliberation. This gap is corroborated by a limited but growing body of empirical studies on governance in deployed DT settings. To address this gap, the paper proposes the skeptical intelligence framework, developed through design science research. The framework integrates three cognitive functions: validation, detection, and deliberation supported by operational principles, governance artifacts, and distributed accountability roles. The framework advances digital twin governance beyond compliance toward a model rooted in critical epistemology, reflexivity, transparency, and democratic legitimacy. Consistent with design science research, the framework is delivered and evaluated at design time; empirical implementation and outcome evaluation are planned across multi-actor digital twin infrastructure contexts, including smart city governance, port logistics, and energy networks, where DT-mediated decisions redistribute opportunities and risks across heterogeneous stakeholders. Empirical validation in an operational setting is planned as the next phase of this research. Full article

This article maps research on artificial intelligence (AI) in Christian Religious Education (CRE) during the first phase of rapid development following the widespread adoption of generative AI. A scoping review was conducted in Scopus, Web of Science, the Open Digital Theological Library, and IxTheo, supplemented by Google Scholar. Included were full-text English-language publications from 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2026 that addressed AI in Christian educational, catechetical, theological–educational, or formative contexts. The final corpus comprised 23 publications. Data were charted by publication type, geographical and educational context, main topic, and key claims or findings. The results show that the field is recent, methodologically heterogeneous, and not yet well consolidated, but that the emerging debate is organised around four inter-related strands: didactic potential and personalisation, ethical–technical limitations, anthropological–theological reflection, and systemic, institutional, and cultural–geographical conditions. The literature is marked by a tension between AI’s didactic potential and concerns regarding its ethical, theological, anthropological, and institutional implications. The review contributes a thematic synthesis that clarifies why AI integration in CRE requires not only educational innovation but also theologically informed, pedagogically mediated, and context-sensitive frameworks for religious formation. Significant gaps remain, including limited empirical and longitudinal research, insufficient attention to students’ and parents’ perspectives, cultural and linguistic contexts, and a lack of religion-specific, empirically tested didactic models. The review concludes that future research should move toward longitudinal, practice-based, and theologically grounded models for AI use in CRE. Full article

Prototyping has evolved from a simple representational artifact into a central mechanism for learning, communication, risk reduction, and decision-making in engineering design. Despite its widespread adoption across engineering disciplines, existing research remains fragmented across domains, methodologies, and application contexts, making it difficult to distinguish broadly applicable principles from context-specific practices. This paper presents a critical review of prototyping research in engineering design, synthesizing evidence from peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers from foundational studies of the 1980s to recent developments in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, digital engineering, and Industry 4.0 systems. A thematic literature review was conducted to identify recurring principles, domain-dependent variations, emerging trends, and persistent limitations in current prototyping practices. The review examines key factors influencing prototyping effectiveness, including purpose, fidelity, timing, stakeholder involvement, modeling and analysis, risk management, economic considerations, and learning-oriented iteration. Particular attention is given to how uncertainty influences prototyping decisions and the ways in which different uncertainty conditions influence the selection, scope, and implementation of prototyping activities. The findings indicate that prototyping is best understood as a context-dependent decision-support activity whose effectiveness depends on the uncertainties, constraints, stakeholders, and design objectives associated with a specific engineering problem. Although several common principles emerge across engineering domains, substantial differences exist in how prototypes are used to support design decisions and system validation. The review identifies research gaps related to uncertainty-driven fidelity selection, integration of modeling, experimentation, and verification activities, and the limited availability of systematic guidance for selecting prototyping strategies across diverse engineering contexts. Future research should focus on generalized prototyping frameworks, quantitative decision-support methods for uncertainty management, enhanced stakeholder integration, and the continued convergence of physical and virtual prototyping environments in next-generation engineering systems. Full article

This paper reviews the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Cost Assessment (LCCA), and ship design optimisation methods and examines the extent to which these approaches have been integrated to support sustainable electric ship design. The main goal is to understand how these methods have been applied and where the key gaps remain. The review analyses current practices in environmental and cost assessments of ship systems and design, along with ship design optimisation methods aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing emissions. Overall, the reviewed literature shows that LCA, LCCA, and ship design optimisation are generally applied as separate processes rather than parts of an integrated framework. Key gaps include the lack of models that account for time-varying costs, changes in technology and energy systems. Additionally, this paper highlights the need for integrated and adaptive frameworks, supported by open and standardised data and digital tools, to better connect environmental and economic considerations across a vessel’s life cycle, for more practical and sustainable ship design. Full article

Spatial literacy and spatial thinking are fundamental skills for understanding space, interpreting geographical phenomena, and enabling active citizenship in a society increasingly driven by geospatial information. This review examines how digital tools and geospatial technologies contribute to cultivating spatial literacy and thinking within primary geography education. Following an integrative, PRISMA-informed review methodology combining searches of Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIC (n = 1373 records identified), this study draws on a corpus of 141 studies—comprising an original set of sources supplemented by newly identified, priority-ranked literature—examining digital maps, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Web GIS, StoryMaps, collaborative mapping, digital games, and augmented and virtual reality in geography teaching. This review proposes an explicit conceptual model clarifying the hierarchical and complementary relationships among spatial skills, spatial thinking, critical spatial thinking, spatial literacy, and spatial citizenship, together with a four-dimensional typology distinguishing technological platforms, representational formats, pedagogical approaches, and learning activity types; both are proposed as synthesizing heuristics for organizing the reviewed evidence and are offered as a basis for future empirical validation rather than as established models. The findings suggest that pedagogically grounded digital integration strengthens spatial skills, shifts learning toward active, participatory models, and helps cultivate spatial citizenship, though the strength of this evidence varies considerably by tool and by educational level, with primary-specific support remaining comparatively limited for higher-order outcomes such as critical spatial thinking. Crucially, the effective integration of these technologies depends on structured teacher training—addressing self-efficacy and confidence-related barriers alongside technical skills—and the adoption of innovative instructional approaches. Ultimately, digital tools provide effective means of deepening geographical learning and strengthening spatial literacy in primary schools. Realizing this potential, however, depends on matching the selection and use of each tool to the specific dimension of spatial learning it is evidenced to support. Full article

Open urban data portals are increasingly proposed as infrastructures for citizen-facing locative services, yet there are no explicit criteria for deciding which georeferenced entities qualify as urban digital locative elements, nor a principled basis for organising them. This hinders semantic interoperability, discovery, and reuse. This article pursues three objectives: to define eligibility criteria distinguishing such elements from other georeferenced data; to derive a faceted, multi-label typology organising them for discovery and reuse; and to assess operational feasibility in a real setting. Following a design-science approach, the artefact, five eligibility criteria and a nine-category typology, was derived by synthesising three evidence sources: a structured literature review, a comparative analysis of six CKAN-based portals in Portugal and Brazil, and an exploratory pilot in Fortaleza, with explicit mappings to FIWARE, schema.org/Place, OpenStreetMap, and CityGML/INSPIRE. The framework was then exercised on the portal corpus and in a working platform, complemented by a small in-situ user study (n = 17). The criteria filtered locative elements effectively, all categories were populated by real datasets, and category-based discovery was understandable in situ, though these findings are preliminary. Open government data thus emerges as an active layer for operationalising locative services, with broader validation left to future work. Full article

Smart city initiatives increasingly claim to be citizen-centric, yet governance frameworks persistently conflate two analytically distinct concepts, citizen participation and citizen engagement, in ways that undermine the design and evaluation of civic involvement mechanisms. This conceptual ambiguity represents a structural problem in the field, not a transitional oversight, and carries direct consequences for how urban managers design governance instruments and measure their effectiveness. This study systematically examines the scope, definition, and operationalization of both concepts in smart city research through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol. A corpus of 43 peer-reviewed articles published between 2011 and 2025, retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science, was subjected to qualitative content analysis using a structured coding framework. Findings reveal that 53% of reviewed studies use participation and engagement interchangeably, a pattern that remains stable across all publication periods, confirming the structural rather than incidental nature of the ambiguity. Only 26% of articles establish a rigorous conceptual distinction and operationalize both terms through distinct analytical frameworks. The review further identifies a critical mechanism design gap: 30% of articles report no engagement mechanism whatsoever, and only 23% report outcomes with verifiable indicators. Based on these findings, this study proposes a conceptual framework that explicitly distinguishes participation, as a behavioral, often episodic act, from engagement, as a sustained, intrinsically motivated process characterized by genuine influence over governance outcomes. The framework offers researchers a theoretically grounded basis for construct differentiation and provides urban managers with actionable criteria for designing governance mechanisms that move beyond symbolic consultation toward authentic co-creation. Implications for digital governance research and smart city policy are discussed, with particular attention to underrepresented contexts in the Global South. Full article

The digital transformation of work has increasingly blurred the temporal, spatial, and psychological boundaries between professional and personal life. As a result, structural conditions have emerged that are associated with an elevated risk of burnout. This narrative review draws on literature identified through searches of Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed covering publications from 2004 to early 2026, which yielded 36 included studies, supplemented by further sources identified outside that search. It integrates key theoretical perspectives, including boundary theory, the Areas of Worklife model, the Job Demands-Resources framework and Conservation of Resources theory. Across diverse occupational contexts, three pathways recur: rising work-family conflict, reduced ability to psychologically detach from work during non-work time and the gradual depletion of personal resources. Structural drivers, comprising organisational availability norms, leadership behaviour, technology and platform design, workload, and economic precarity, are treated as the conditions under which exposure arises, and the review argues that responses pitched at individual coping are correspondingly limited. The public health implications extend beyond mental health, encompassing cardiovascular risk associated with long working hours, strain on healthcare systems, productivity losses and widening health inequities along gendered and socioeconomic lines. Addressing these challenges requires multilevel interventions, including organisational job redesign, leadership development, enforceable right-to-disconnect policies and greater recognition of recovery as a public health priority. At the same time, there remains a need for more longitudinal and intervention-based research, particularly in non-Western contexts. Full article

Land consolidation (LC) is increasingly expected to support food security, ecological restoration, rural development, and climate mitigation, yet evidence on its carbon effects remains fragmented across engineering, ecological, spatial, and governance research. This review combines bibliometric mapping with structured evidence synthesis of 355 records from WoS and CNKI to examine knowledge evolution, analytical paradigms, and their integration. The field has expanded from component-based assessments of construction emissions, soil carbon, and land-cover change toward life-cycle accounting, carbon fractions, ecosystem-service interactions, spatial optimization, and policy evaluation. WoS-indexed and Chinese-language literature show distinct but increasingly convergent orientations shaped by differences in intervention contexts, disciplinary traditions, analytical scales, and available evidence. Four complementary paradigms are identified: carbon accounting, biogeochemical processes, spatial land systems, and decision support and governance. Together, these paradigms reveal interconnected carbon pathways but remain constrained by inconsistent accounting boundaries, weak process–scale–time linkages, and limited integration with land-governance decisions. Future research should therefore advance standardized life-cycle and multi-scale accounting, mechanism-based assessment of long-term carbon and ecosystem-service dynamics, and digitally and institutionally enabled low-carbon governance. Full article

Background/Objectives: Children now spend a substantial part of daily life in digital environments, and their digital, media, and information literacies shape their online safety, social-emotional development, and mental health, making these competencies a concern for child public health and preventive paediatric care. This study applies a Synthetic Knowledge Synthesis (SKS) to map how digital, media, and information literacies (hereafter digital literacies) among children have evolved, comparing neurotypical and neurodivergent children. SKS is a semi-automated approach that combines descriptive bibliometrics, keyword co-occurrence mapping, and qualitative content analysis to map an entire research field or topic. Methods: We treat digital literacies as relevant to children’s health, well-being, and safe online participation, and we analyse Scopus-indexed literature from 1996 to 2025 using descriptive bibliometrics, keyword co-occurrence mapping, and qualitative content analysis. Results: The mapping shows strong growth in general digital-literacy scholarship alongside a small but persistent body of work on a “double digital divide” affecting children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), ADHD, and dyslexia. The two bodies of work differ in emphasis: the general literature foregrounds social integration and critical agency, while research on neurodivergent children foregrounds inclusive pedagogy, implicit learning, and multimodal expression. It also shifts from general digital-safety awareness toward protective mediations for vulnerabilities such as social-emotional decoding differences and impulsivity, which bear on children’s online safety and mental health. Because bibliometric mapping reveals where research is concentrated rather than what works in practice, the synthesis points to evidence gaps rather than proven methods. Conclusions: On this basis, we argue for an integrated public-health and socio-educational framework that complements universal literacy standards with adaptive, assistive safety nets, so that all children can take part in digital life safely and on equal terms. Full article

Historic buildings occupy a sensitive position in contemporary energy and heritage management because they combine building-performance requirements, material-conservation constraints, and dynamic patterns of use. This study maps the broader historic-building literature at the intersection of energy-efficient restoration, building decarbonization, heritage conservation, and sustainable tourism, and interprets the resulting bibliometric structure with particular implications for historic stone places of worship. Records were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and screened through a PRISMA 2020-aligned protocol, yielding 804 publications. Accordingly, the 804-record corpus represents a broad historic-building and heritage-management evidence base rather than an exhaustive dataset restricted exclusively to stone religious buildings. Performance analysis and science mapping were conducted using Bibliometrix, while bibliographic coupling and longitudinal thematic-evolution analyses were added to examine contemporary research fronts and their temporal continuity. Co-citation analysis identified two partially separated intellectual schools—European conservation microclimate and adaptive reuse management—whereas bibliographic coupling revealed five current research-front communities, including adaptive reuse and sustainability, microclimate-conservation-energy, and an emerging HBIM/digital-documentation front. Thematic evolution showed increasing post-2019 convergence of tourism and management with conservation and cultural-heritage research, but continued separation from technical energy and microclimate streams. The study therefore moves beyond descriptive rankings to identify structural fragmentation and three priority directions: integrated monitoring of visitor loads, energy, and conservation performance; HBIM-supported spatial integration; and stronger cross-national research collaboration. The findings are interpreted as bibliometric evidence and research-agenda signals rather than as causal proof of building or policy performance. Full article

Digital technologies have become an essential part of modern workplaces, improving communication, efficiency, and organisational processes. However, excessive and uncontrolled use of digital technologies may negatively affect employees’ well-being and workplace productivity. This narrative literature review examines the relationship between digital addiction and workplace productivity by focusing on the individual, social, and organisational consequences of problematic digital technology use. The study first defines the concepts of digital addiction and workplace productivity to establish a conceptual framework. It then discusses how problematic digital technology use, including excessive internet use, social media use, smartphone use, screen use, gaming disorder, and online gambling, may influence productivity through distraction, reduced concentration, poor time management, stress, health problems, and impaired work–life balance. The review highlights that digital technologies are not inherently harmful; rather, productivity problems arise from uncontrolled and problematic patterns of use. The study concludes by suggesting organisational and individual-level interventions, including digital awareness training, responsible technology use policies, improved time management practices, and supportive workplace environments to reduce the negative effects of digital addiction. Full article

Vernacular heritage conservation often separates material fabric, environmental adaptation, and social meaning. This study addresses that separation for one settlement. Socio-environmental heritage is defined here as heritage whose significance resides in the documented interdependence of environmental conditions, material practice, social organisation, and customary governance, rather than in fabric or imagery alone. The single purpose of the article is to develop and demonstrate an evidence-based method for interpreting and conserving Thee Ain Heritage Village in Al-Baha, Saudi Arabia, as such a system. A qualitative architectural case-study design combines a structured literature search, regional comparison, the author’s 2014 field observations and photographs, and published digital-heritage, energy-retrofit, and conservation studies; no human-participant data are analysed. Evidence is organised through three analytical layers—climatic material, socio-spatial, and customary governance—and each evidence–interpretation proposition is classified as directly observed, supported architectural inference, or hypothesis requiring measurement; conservation translation is treated as the output of this sequence rather than as a parallel analytical layer. Coded claim units are documented individually so that every interpretation and implication can be traced to its source, strength, and limitation. The analysis links rocky siting, stone and timber assemblies, thick load-bearing madameek walls, limited openings, vertical domestic hierarchy, controlled thresholds, and the agricultural setting to conservation priorities at landscape, construction, spatial, and adaptation scales. These priorities include compatible repair, retention of wall depth and opening logic, protection of privacy gradients and threshold sequences, and service integration without reducing the village to stone-clad imagery. Unlike previous work centred on digital documentation, energy modelling, or policy-level preservation, the contribution is an evidence-structured method linking architectural observation to bounded interpretation, conservation decisions, and explicit future testing requirements. Full article

While deepening regional connectivity, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) poses formidable challenges to conservation of biodiversity in ecologically sensitive areas along its routes. It makes stronger international cooperation on biodiversity conservation imperative for participating countries. However, the existing literature predominantly focuses on single-country institutional analyses or project-level ecological impact assessments, leaving a gap in the integrated governance framework that bridges “internal institutional supply” and “external international cooperation”. The study finds that recent practices along BRI routes show concentrated progress in several key areas: refining targeted legislation in key sectors, integrating local ecosystem characteristics into conservation approaches, and safeguarding the rights and interests of local communities through diverse channels. By systematically classifying the practices of six representative case studies—including the Mombasa–Nairobi Railway and the Karot Hydropower Plant—the evolving trends for biodiversity conservation under the BRI have been revealed: diversification of conservation subjects and digitalization of conservation methods. To balance the supply and demand of the system, the institutional innovation of China’s biodiversity conservation could be realized through dual-dimensional optimization (internal institutional design + external international cooperation). The specific proposals are as follows: (1) Strengthening domestic institutional rigidity: At the top-level design stage, this entails advancing sui generis legislation for biodiversity conservation, encouraging joint rulemaking by local governments and line ministries, and leveraging the supplementary and constraining effects of treaty-based and contractual standards. At the implementation stage, introducing the community co-management model requires improving public participation mechanisms, such as diversified communication channels. (2) Activating the flexibility of international cooperation, establishing BRI Ecological Cloud digital platforms for data sharing and dynamic monitoring, and joint conservation efforts should be conducted through cross-border projects with BRI partner countries, harnessing project resources to achieve mutual benefits in global biodiversity governance to promote the transnational legal process of biodiversity conservation and global ecological civilization construction. Full article