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Business GIS-tourism industry-A study
Jaishankar Jayaraman
Institute of Remote Sensing, Anna University, Chennai
Email: jai_igs@yahoo.com
Businesses manage a world of information about sales, customers, inventory, demographic profiles, mailing lists, and so much more. At the very core of this information is a geographic location, an address, a service boundary, a sales territory, and a delivery route that can be illustrated and interactively managed on a map. GIS software is reshaping the business world. From multinational corporations to entrepreneurial start-ups, from hardware stores to hospitals, companies of every kind are introducing geographic analysis to solve business problems. In the process, they're making better decisions, delivering better service, and finding new market opportunities. Businesses are using GIS technology to find solutions for marketing, site selection, asset management, risk analysis, regulatory compliance, delivery routing, customer service, demographic analysis, and much more. GIS enables businesses to better understand and evaluate their data by creating graphic displays using information stored in their databases. But a GIS does more than just display data; it enables users to interactively and dynamically analyze and manage the information linked to those locations. And by simply updating the information linked to a map, the map automatically reflects those changes. It is this analytical capability of the GIS which strongly supports the need for existence of such system for business planning. GIS allows the creation of map displays simply by pointing and clicking. GIS lets users visualize and analyze information in new ways, revealing previously hidden relationships, patterns, and trends. Business people in marketing, advertising, insurance, and retail are already using GIS to analyze markets, optimize media campaigns, pinpoint the best store locations, and model demographic spending patterns.
The present paper emphasis the power of GIS in support to the Tourism industry, wherein a customized package was developed in assisting a Tourister in selecting Hotels, to suit his requirements, and to suggest the tourister his needs such has nearest shopping center's to his hotel, or nearest place of Worship, or areas of interest closer to his hotel. The case study was made with respect to Chennai city, incorporating the spatial database of the city as point data, As Shape file (not to Scale), and associated attribute data pertaining to the spatial data was created on MS-Access. A easy interface for the user was customized where in the user can query on the datasets to retrieve tabular and spatial information. Provision was also made for hosting the information on the web, such that the Client can view the information and query using ArcExplorer 3.0 software, provided the spatial database should be hosted using Internet Map Server. The primary software used was ArcView3.2 GIS under windows environment.
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