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Sailing holiday activities represent a significant portion of the Blue Economy growth in Europe and across the world. Due to the global financial crisis, yacht ownership has declined, but demand for such holiday products remained steady, therefore shifting the yachters profile towards younger and less experienced consumers who prefer to charter boats, rather than own one. Boat chartering offers more flexibility to explore different regions from year to year, but this means that significantly more time must be spent planning the route, since local experience is absent. The tourists' experience during the initial contemplation and planning phase, taking place weeks or months before an actual trip, and where a broad range of route options needs to be explored, could thus significantly benefit from support given by automated IT tools. Current literature demonstrates a complete lack of research in the development of itinerary recommendation systems in the context of sailing holidays. In this paper, we describe a methodology for the automatic generation of route recommendations, based on the semantic modelling of spatial data, and the determination of realistic sea route options, based on vessel density maps produced from raw AIS data. We demonstrate the implementation and results from this methodology using one of the most popular sailing regions of Greece, namely the Ionian Sea, as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to development of research tools for observation and analysis of educational practices used by teachers in preschool classrooms. More specifically, we approached the implemented curriculum of mathematics in Greek preschool education. We analysed the recorded data from a week of teaching practices in eight classrooms of Greek public kindergartens, based on Bernstein's theoretical framework on pedagogic discourse. The results showed that the actual educational practices in the observed classrooms deviated from the objectives of the official new cross-thematic curriculum for teaching mathematics in Greek kindergarten in terms of the form of transmitted mathematical knowledge, the instructional rules and strategies that teachers adopted for teaching mathematics, and the teaching-interactive relationships between preschool teachers and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers presented at the "Managing Global Trends and Challenges in a Turbulent Economy," on October 13-15, 2005 in Chios Island, Greece, is presented. Topics discussed include flexible operating and control systems, mass customization and supply chain management, and information and communication technology strategies.