Location based enquiry services in mobile devices

Abstract

Tourism industry is important in Hong Kong. In the past, people who travel to Hong Kong usually join traveling agent. However, with the opening of the China marketing, more and more people go to Hong Kong without joining traveling agent. People who come to Hong Kong themselves would probably buy a tourist guide book to get information about the places they want to travel. The printed tourist guides, however, cannot update the information about the places dynamically after it is printed. Moreover, it is not easy to find places with specific target, e.g. find nearby restaurants with specific price range. In the handheld market, there are lots of electronic tourist guides to providing better functionality than the tourist guide books. For example, they can provide nearby information and use GPS to detect user’s current location. However, they are usually stored and run in the client sided machine. The main limitation of such kinds of applications are the information cannot updated dynamically just like the tourist guide books. Because of these, a web based electronic traveling guide is developed in my project to get the most updated location based information through the internet with the use of E-GPS (Location Tracking System in Sunday®) to detect users’ current location. In addition, the web based server side administration system is developed together with the electronic traveling guide to allow the publication and dynamically update of the location information.