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Scalable and Interoperable Tourism Information System based on the WebGIS
Wencai Du, Yair Gabay
*The Center for Geographic Information Sciences
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
Haifa, 32000, Israel
Phone: +972-4-8293134
Fax: +972-4-8234757
Email : wencai@tx.technion.ac.il,
cvryair@tx.technion.ac.il
1. Introduction
Tourism is an information-intensive and information-sensitive industry in which electronic commerce, WebGIS, and Internet technologies are expected to play a significant role. It is evident that both the way the information is presented and the approach to tourist searching for information has a great impact on the tourist’s decision and satisfaction.
vWith the tremendous growth of the Web, today, all types of Tourism Information (TI) providers already have homepages on the Web for storing the comprehensive description of the tourist destination and for presenting tourism products. Almost all homepages support static HTML-page. However, the problem is that HTML was designed specifically to describe the presentation, not the content. There is nothing in the HTML text to make it easy for other programs to understand the structure and content of such data. Existing TISs built on HTML are a lack of dynamic, scalable, extensible and interactive functionalities. They are also unable to integrate geographic data and tourism information. They fail in accessing and exchanging the data available in heterogeneous TISs. These limitations have pushed for the need for more sophisticated information system and web standards, such as WebGIS, XML and SVG technologies.
The challenges are how to present information related to tourism on the Web and to access to multiple, distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous information sources. One of the solutions is through establishing a WebGIS-based TIS and creating flexible data interchange facilities in the system, thus allowing dynamic and interactive presentation of tourism information and interchange of data with other TISs. Information technologies, for example, web-based GIS and XML-based technology, can be expected to meet these challenges.
vIn this paper, we investigate the design of WebGIS-based TIS using XML and SVG technologies. We present an architecture for such a tourism information system, and describe such prototype Tel Aviv WebGIS tourism Information System (TATIS). The prototype does not currently implement all the features and components that we present in this paper, but the most important elements are already designed.
2. Design of WebGIS-Based Tourism Information System
2.1 Design objectives
The tourists play the main role in tourism. Thus, the purpose in designing this WebGIS-based TIS is to improve the contact with the tourist through better, more attractive, multimedia and up-to-date information, in particular digitized information in the form of text, image, videos, sound, etc. as well as instantaneous information such as availability of rooms and seats. Thus, to design TATIS has to focus on the content aspects by providing detailed, accurate and actual tourism information and by offering vividly presenting the information on the system as well as providing appropriate search mechanisms. Using the system, users may obtain a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date tourism information on Tel Aviv and all destination facilities, places worth seeing, and certain tourism products can get attracting view of the destination, and can buy products either offline or online. By providing better information the tourists might be more satisfied and willing to spend their holidays in Tel Aviv.
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