Electronic tourist guide

Abstract

Traveling is a highly common way for spending holidays and learning culture of other countries. People go traveling without joining tour trips organized by traveling agents would probably buy tourist guide books to get details and information about the destination country. Functionalities of these tourist guide books are limited by their paper-printed nature. Information cannot be update once it is published. Paper-printed books are also non-interactive. Moreover, all the information on these traveling books is provided by book editors which, in some cases, may not be objective enough. Developing a traveling guide application on handheld device which is opened to public for sharing tourist information can overcomes the limitations on tourist guide books. In handheld device market, including Pocket PC and Palm, there are quite many software packaged for tourists. However, a common shortage can be found on these software packages. They do bias on providing map information or assistant functions. Moreover, similar to traveling books, these applications only provide information from editors to users in a one-way direction, lacking of information exchanging. In order to provide more up-to-date information and interactivity to tourists, Electronic Tourist Guide is developed on Pocket PC for providing map information, tourist sight pictures & description, user comments, special events information, assisting function and e-coupons to user. All the information on Electronic Tourist Guide can be updated regularly by applying patch files onto user’s program. The traveling information which is used for building patch files is updatable and editable by public. For some special events of a city or scenic spot, it helps users to add reminder and set alarm onto user’s scheduler, which can assist user when he/she is drafting traveling plan. User can even write comments on scenic spots and shared them to other users. Therefore, comments and information on Electronic Tourist Guide would become more objective and up-to-date. From the view of shop owners and government, they can attract tourists spending money in their countries by providing e-coupon, which would finally favor overall development of tourism.