A tourism information system for rural areas based on a multi platform concept

Abstract

Tourism information is predominantly based on geographically related information and therefore, the tourism and leisure industries are currently searching for ways how to explore the potential of technologies for presenting geographical data. In this paper a concept and its realization for a multi-platform solution for a geo-multimedia tourism information system are briefly described. In general the system is targeting on two different user groups, the tourism boards as service providers and the tourists as end-users. The concept covers an efficient data management for the service providers and state of the art visualization techniques for online, offline and mobile solutions. These cover the 2D as well as the 3D visualization of geo related tourism information and also interfaces to third party platforms. Such platforms like Google Earth and Google Maps became even more important in the last year due to their extensive dissemination. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.