Global trade relies heavily on shipping; yet maritime law frameworks often fail to protect seafarers’ human rights adequately. Seafarers thus continue to experience coerced labor, abandonment, harassment, or inadequate treatment. This research aims to establish a cohesive legal framework safeguarding seafarers’ human rights through a comparative analysis of international and Korean maritime law. It provides an overview of the current status of seafarers’ human rights protection; describes the theoretical framework of human rights principles and maritime labor; reviews and analyzes legal precedents regarding seafarers’ human rights; and offer recommendations for international and domestic (Korean) policies and industry and stakeholder engagement to strengthen the protection of seafarers’ human rights. This manuscript addresses soft law initiatives, including the Neptune Declaration, Geneva Declaration, and the training and accountability proposals from the IMO-ILO. The authors advocate for more stringent national legislation, comprehensive worldwide SASH training, and enhanced oversight. Ultimately, the rights of seafarers necessitate enforceable legal reform, global collaboration, and interagency support.

Purpose: In the 4th industrial revolution, services that incorporate various smart technologies in the tourism sector have begun to gain popularity. Accordingly, academic discussions on smart tourism have also started to become active in various fields. Despite recent research, the definition of smart tourism is still ambiguous, and it is not easy to differentiate its scope or characteristics from traditional tourism concepts. Thus, this study aims to analyze the perception of smart tourism exposed online to identify the current point of smart tourism in Korea and present the research direction for conceptualizing smart tourism suitable for the domestic situation. Research design, data, and methodology: This study analyzes the perception of smart tourism exposed online based on 20,198 news data from portal sites over the past six years. Data on words used with smart tourism were collected from the leading portal sites Naver, Daum, and Google. Text mining techniques were applied to identify the social awareness status of smart tourism. Network analysis was used to visualize the results between words related to smart tourism, and CONCOR analysis was conducted to derive clusters formed by words having similarity. Results: As a result of keyword analysis, the frequency of words related to the development and construction of smart tourism areas was high. The analysis of the centrality of the connection between words showed that the frequency of keywords was similar, and that the words “smartphones” and “China” had relatively high connection centrality. The results of network analysis and CONCOR indicated that words were formed into eight groups including related technologies, promotion, globalization, service introduction, innovation, regional society, activation, and utilization guide. The overall results of data analysis showed that the development of smart tourism cities was a noticeable issue. Conclusions: This study is meaningful in that it clearly reflects the differences in the perception of smart tourism between online and research trends despite various efforts to develop smart tourism in Korea. In addition, this study highlights the need to understand smart tourism concepts and enhance academic discussions. It is expected that such academic discussions will contribute to improving the competitiveness of smart tourism research in Korea.