Developing Web-Based Tourist Information Tools Using Google Map
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Developing Web-Based Tourist Information Tools Using
Google Map
Bing Pana,
John C. Crottsa, and
Brian Mullerb
a
Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management
College of Charleston, USA
{panb, crottsj}@cofc.edu
b
Butterfat LLC
Charleston, SC, 29401 USA
muller@musc.edu
Abstract
This paper reports an explanatory study of using Google Map API to develop two destination-
specific tourist information tools: a handheld tour guide and an online trip planner for
Charleston, South Carolina, USA. The background, development, functionality, and adoption
issues were discussed. The handheld tour guide is based on mobile phones with a GPS antenna
to communicate with Google Map and deliver real-time and location-sensitive tourist
information. Online Charleston trip planner combines destination specific information with
Google Map to provide an interactive trip planning tool based on the map metaphor. The
handheld tour guide is slow and unstable due to memory limitations and slow Internet
connection provided by the mobile phone service. The online trip planner is being adopted by
various hotels and conferences. The development effort demonstrated that Google Map API is a
flexible tool with reasonable speed for developing destination-specific online services. For
mobile tools, the computing power and wireless connections of small devices are the
bottlenecks when communicating with online services.
Keywords: GPS, GIS, Google Map, handheld, ubiquitous computing, tourist information.
1 Background
Advancements in technology have changed the way we travel and plan our trips.
However, trip planning online has been a frustrating experience (Pan & Fesenmaier,
2006). Information on various aspects of a trip and destination is distributed: travellers
may need to book an airline ticket from expedia.com; then he/she goes to Hilton.com
to find the hotel room and then switches to a local convention and visitors bureau site
to check out destination information. However, travellers need to put together these
pieces of tourist information in their trip plans: they need to find out the relevant
distance from the airport to the hotel, as well as the distance between different
attractions and the accommodations (Duran, Seker, &Shrestha, 2004). Frequently, the
travellers will rely on offline tools, such as pencil and paper, to record their locations
and then using online mapping tools to piece together the relevant locations (Pan &
Fesenmiaer, 2006). The current trip planning practices apparently lack the integration of location information of various aspects of the trips. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence confirmed that with the ubiquitous information access and more hectic life styles, travellers plan less and less ahead of a trip and engage in more on-route and in-destination planning (Fesenmaier & Vogt, 1992; Fesenmaier, Vogt, & Stewart, 1993). For example, travellers frequently call hotels to reserve a room while in the car or check out adjacent attractions while touring a city. Ad-hoc decisions on restaurants or attractions are also a part of the fun during a trip which can create pleasant surprises. However, travellers still could not access all the travel related information as they wish. For example, if a traveller walks around downtown in a destination, and sees a restaurant on the corner of King Street and Calhoun Street, she could not check out the rating and other visitors’ comments about the restaurant easily. Similarly, if she sees a beautiful house on Meeting Street, she would like to know when it was built, and its architectural and historical significance. She could not obtain this information without joining a tour group or having a mobile phone with web access. In the latter case, the information access is still awkward since she need to search on the web through her tiny cell phone screen. Thus, providing appropriate destination related tourist information to the right visitors at the right time and the right place is still a challenge and much is needed for next generation of information technologies for tourism industry. Recent technology developments based on Geographic Information System (GIS) and satellite images have provided a new way of accessing location-based information. Google Map can provide interactive mapping services as well as realistic satellite images. More importantly, the free Google Map Application Programming Interface (API) (Google, 2006) allows thousands of programmers to tap into the powerful Google mapping service by connecting it with various types of data, from sex offenders’ addresses to the demographic information of the United States (Darlin, 2005). Combined with destination-specific tourist information, Google Map could provide a new way of trip planning and tourist information accessing. This paper documents the effort in developing two web-based destination information tools for Charleston, South Carolina, USA, based on Google Map API: a handheld Charleston tour guide and an online interactive trip planner to Charleston; it discusses the advantages and limitations of using Google Map API to develop trip planning and tourist information accessing tools. 2 Recent Developments on Ubiquitous Computing and Mapping Services Recent developments in hardware, software, and openly available geographical data have provided new opportunities for developing location-based tourist information access and trip planning tools. This section briefly reviews the relevant development.
While computing devices are getting smaller, smarter, and more connected, any time and any access to any information during a trip is becoming a reality (Weiser, 1994). Most current models of mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) have the capability to access the Internet through wireless connections. Laptops could also access phone service network for Internet connections while Wi-Fi spots are not available. However, the speed of Internet access on mobile devices vary: the new standard 3G technology could provide download speeds of 150 Kbps to 700 Kbps and a speed of 150 Kbps max for uploading; most current mobile devices can only have a speed of 50Kbps (Null, 2006; Glenn, 2006). None of these standards can rival broadband access through landlines. In addition, the limited screen side of most mobile devices restrict its extensive usage on cognitively intensive tasks. Geographical Information System (GIS) have been adopted widely in tourism settings, from information kiosks, hiking maps, to web-based maps (Duran, Seker, & Shrestha, 2004). Those online GIS tools combine the power of GIS with the ubiquity of the Internet. Google Map is one web-based tool which can be used to access large amounts of geographical information as well as routing capability. Google Map Application Program Interface (API) allows a programmer to embed Google Maps in his/her own web pages with JavaScript. A programmer can add overlays to the map, including markers and polylines, and display information windows linked to other data sources. The Maps API is a free service and available for any web site that is free to consumers (Google, 2006). Recently there have been developments in both integrated and location-based trip planning tools and mobile information access. Duran, Seker, and Shrestha (2004) provided a conceptual model and technical on the uses of integrated web-based GIS system combining geographical data with tourism data for public and management usage. Brisaboa et. al. (2003) developed an interactive map with JavaApplet to access touristic and cultural information of Galicia, Spain. They used GIS technology combined with multimedia databases to present multimedia content. The two interface metaphors they are using are browsing and map metaphor. However, the JavaApplet needs a certain period of downloading time and requires Java Virtual Machine to run on the client side of the computer. Furthermore, various GPS (Global Positioning System) based technologies are getting more and more affordable. For example, GoCar, A GPS-guided storytelling car, has gained more and more popularity in San Francisco (GoCar, 2005). The small car navigates and shows the driver directions as well as acting as a tour guide for directing the tourists to the best sites and telling the stories that bring San Francisco to life. However, the rental fee of GoCar is relatively expensive and it might not be suitable for use in certain cities which have narrow streets. Using mobile devices to access location-based information might be a good direction for developing tourist information tools. A mobile tour of Cornell campus has been developed in which a mobile phone with location information could guide the visitors of the campus to hidden treasures of Cornell University (HCI Lab, 2005).
3 Theoretical Foundations and Issues Various theories have pointed to the power of map metaphor and mapping interface. People engage in cognitive mapping as they collect, organize, store, remember and utilize information about their surrounding environment. Travellers build cognitive maps of the destinations through direct experience, roadside signs and tourist maps (Downs & Stea, 1977; Guy, Curtis, & Crotts, 1990). Research has shown that cognitive maps could substantially influence consumer’s commerce or interactions with the environment, including exploring, touring, shopping, purchasing, and patronage (Grossbart & Rammohan, 1980; Holahan & Dobrowolyn, 1978; Guy, Curtis, & Crotts, 1990). However, one of the most important tool for building cognitive maps, the physical tourist maps, are usually static, limited in the volume of information, and could be complicated to use for first-time visitors because of the unfamiliarity with the orientation and layout of the city. We hypothesize that location-based information trip planning and on-route and during-trip information providence could help the visitors to build cognitive maps more quickly and in more details. As a result, those visitors will be more engaged, visit more attractions, spend more on food and entertainments, achieve a higher satisfaction, and become more loyal customers. The goal of the proposed project is to build and test two web-based tools: a GPS-enabled handheld information device for the visitors to tour downtown Charleston, South Carolina, USA; and an online interactive trip planning tool for the same destination. Specifically, Travellers to Charleston complained about the confusing traffic signs, complicated road network, and busy traffic conditions. Pre-trip planning can help to build cognitive maps and reduce stress during the visiting period; these types of information can also be delivered to a traveller in real-time through wireless and location-sensitive information access. The first tool will provide visitors with location-sensitive texts, images, audios, and videos based on their actual physical locations; the second program will help the visitors plan their trips to Charleston using an interactive map prior to their departure or in their hotel rooms. It was expected that these tools could increase the visitors’ satisfaction about the destination, promote more visitations to different attractions, increase sales on food, entertainments and attractions, and foster more loyal visitors. Potentially the devices could become a new marketing channel and a new revenue source for the technology services. It should be noted that this study is not a complete research effort on the usefulness of Google Map, but rather an explanatory study on the researchers’ and developers’ own experience. 4 Developments of Handheld Charleston Tour Guide 4.1 Conceptualization In the conceptualization stage, the developers are expected to build a piece of software based on a handheld device equipped with GPS. The multimedia content, including text, images, audio and video will be stored on the hard drive of the mobile device. Based on the identification of location through the GPS chip, the mobile
device could dynamically update the map location and orientation, and provide
multimedia information if requested by the traveller. Furthermore, a website is
planned to set up so that various tourism businesses, including hotels, restaurants, and
attractions, could update their information on a daily even hourly basis, for example, a
special deal for the day if the restaurant is short of customers or a hotel is having a
low occupancy rate. It could generate a new type of marketing channel in which the
businesses are advertising to the visitors with close spatial proximity and who are
likely to be hungry or tired. See Fig. 1 for an initial conceptualization of the device.
Fig. 1. Conceptualization of Charleston Handheld Tour Guide
4.2 Technical Development
In the actual development stage, the device chosen was HP iPAQ hw6500 Pocket PC
combined with Cingular network service (HP, 2006). This device runs on Windows
Mobile 2003 which ensures maximum development capability; it has a build-in GPS
receiver; is uses the integrated GSM/GPRS/EDGE and quad-band GSM phone
capabilities which provide reasonable data access through Cingular network. It has
64MB built-in SDRAM and 64M Flash memory. Because of limited financial
resources, a stand-alone program is estimated to cost around one year-person
programming time and around 70K labour cost since it needs to build a GIS
application on this Pocket PC. Thus, a web-based solution is adopted which uses
Google Map API.Technical structure of the device is described in Fig. 2. First, the information about
the members of travel council, a destination marketing organization, was collected
and a database of attractions, hotels, restaurants, and recreation facilities of Charleston
was built with their GPS coordinates. A user interacts with the web browser Minimo
on the handheld device. A program on the handheld is developed to retrieve location
information from the GPS antenna and then pass the location information to the
application web server. The application web server uses the location information to
pass it to Google Map server and retrieve map images and routing information. In
addition, the application web server retrieves the tourist information database an
overlay them with Google Map. It then returns the map images and tourist
information to the web browser on the handheld through wireless data transfer. The
user of the handheld device could choose to display different types of tourist
information at his or her will. The actual user interface is shown in Fig. 3.
JavaScript Wireless
User Web Browser
Connection
Broadband
Application Google Map
Web Server Server
Connection
GPS Program
Hand held Device
Tourist
Information
Database
Fig. 2. The Technical Structure of Handheld Charleston Tour Guide
4.3 Problems and Issues in Testing
After the finish of the prototype, a few researchers conducted a few user testing
sessions in downtown Charleston. The prototype of the handheld device works with a
few limitations. The speed of wireless data connection is low and thus the refreshing
of Google Map screen is slow and always lagging behind the walking speed of the
testers. In addition, the web browser on the handheld device, Minimo, requires certain
amount of memory to run. The existing memory of 128MB is not sufficient and
causes frequent crashes. The device needs to restart from time to time. Thus, the speed
of wireless connection and the memory of the handheld device are two major
bottlenecks of the program. Again, a standalone program without using the web
browser and Google Map API may bypass these bottlenecks. However, the cost of
developing are rather high and it is not very scalable: for example, a different program
will be needed to develop another program for a different destination.Fig. 3. Handheld Charleston Tour Guide 5 Developments of Interactive Online Charleston Trip Planner 5.1 Conceptualization As discussed before, online tourist information is distributed in different parts of the web space and an integrated trip planning interface is needed. Also a map metaphor could take advantage of visitors’ cognitive mapping capability and increase their satisfaction level, purchase intention, involvement and loyalty in visitation. The online Charleston trip planner is based on the basic structure used in handheld Charleston planner project. Instead of using it during a trip, this tool is intended for the visitors to plan trips before actually leaving their homes or in their hotel rooms. The visitors should be able to plan trips using this interactive interface, save their itinerary, add comments and notes, and print out a paper copy and carry with them to the destination. 5.2 Functionality and Technical Development Fig. 4 shows a screenshot of the interface. On the left side, various tourist attractions, accommodations, and dining places retrieved from the travel council database, which is built in the first development project for the handheld tour guide. The visitors will
be able to add these different properties to their itinerary. When added, the locations
of those selected will show up on the map. When multiple addresses were added,
directions between those locations will be automatically displayed at the bottom of the
page. The user will also be able to move the locations up and down, rearrange them,
and set one of them as default starting point. A user will be able to add another map in
which he/she could plan itinerary for another day. When finished, he/she could print
the itineraries for multiple days out with each individual itinerary and carry it during
the trip.
Fig. 4. Online Charleston Trip Planner (http://www.ota.cofc.edu/tripplanner/)
The program uses cookies to track the user session. So a user visits the site for the
second time from the same computer will have all the previous selections and routing
information retrieved and displayed. In addition, a user will be able to create an
account using his/her email address and store all the itinerary information in his/her
account. By pressing a button, the itinerary information can be emailed to the user.Fig. 5. The Technical Structure of Online Charleston Trip Planner The software utilizes a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP combination on the backend, and asynchronous JavaScript on the front end. The client browser first loads a blank template page that contains layout but no content. The JavaScript then requests different lists of necessary content from the server. Based on these lists, the client can then requests the elements in the list. What is returned in both cases from the server is either in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and is dependant upon the existence and content of the client's previous session information. The user interface is then constructed based upon this data. Most interaction between the user and their browser results in communication with the server to maintain a persistent state based upon the client's session. Fig. 5 depicts a diagram of the technical structure. 5.3 Adoption and Promotion Various conference organizers in Charleston have showed interests to adopt it as a trip planning tool for their participants. A few customized trip planning tools are being developed for a few conferences planned in Charleston area. Initial feedbacks from meeting planners indicate that this is a very useful and intuitive interface for meeting and convention participants. 6 Conclusions and Future Development This paper documented the effort of developing tourist information tools using Google Map API. This is not a complete research effort on the usefulness of Google Map, but rather an explanatory study on the researchers’ and developers’ own experience. The program developed by the researchers is scalable and can be easily customized to other destinations and areas. For mobile computing devices, the
computing power and wireless connections of small devices are the bottlenecks in
terms of communicating with online services.
More intensive and formal user testing is under the way for the online trip planning
tool in order to improve the usability of the interface. Furthermore, with the
advancement of hardware, especially faster wireless connections (3G technology) and
increased memory of handheld technologies, it is expected that the Charleston
handheld tour guide could work more effectively. Combining the tour guide with the
trip planning tool could integrate pre-trip plan with during-trip planning and provide
more personalized and relevant information during a trip. In addition, post-trip
evaluation can be integrated into the system in which the users will be able to rank the
different properties they have gone to. Future development can also include an
interface for tourism enterprises to update their information daily even hourly (for
example, a special deal for the day) to market toward visitors on the road or 100 or
200 yards around them. Location and map-based tourist information tools based on
Google Map API opened many opportunities to enhance visitor experience as well as
connecting visitors with tourism properties in destinations.
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