Intelligent Tourist Information System

Intelligent Tourist Information System

ABSTRACT

Nowadays people use mobile phones and other mobile devices. Most of us have a small computing device that is always with us. People use it example for calling, as calendar and organizer. Mobile devices with GPS receiver are also used to find paths in navigation. The main disadvantage of those systems is that we have to know places which we want to visit and they usually do not store any usable, valuable information about points of interest except phone numbers and addresses. The main idea of this thesis was to design a system that will run on most of phones and palms and will be helpful when visiting some new places and cities. This system should be able to find a route using user criteria. Those criteria should be simple and natural, like for example: a list of museums, the most famous historical objects, restaurants to visit, constraints to travel by bus and by walking. The system should find a path that fulfils those criteria, show it on screen, show names of objects, some short descriptions and photos of them and possible entrance costs. It should also be able to estimate time needed to travel from one object to the next and if it is possible, advise which bus line or other public means of transport may be used. It should be helpful for people that want to visit a city without having much information about it. Paths that are output of this system are only a proposition for trip. They will not be optimal but can not be counterintuitive and must be acceptable by the user.

Keywords: mobile devices, tourism and navigation, path finding, creating maps process.

INTRODUCTION

People travel a lot. Most of us have a mobile phone or a navigation device. If they want to make a successful trip they must prepare for it. At beginning a city which will be visited should be chosen. After that those places, buildings and monuments which are important and will be seen need to be selected to include in the trip. Very important is also calculation about the trip cost and the time needed for it. Sometimes people do not have enough time to prepare themselves or they spend few hours in some city without planning this before. Another fact is that people do not have enough time for planning. Most of them ask friends or go for trips organized by tourist companies where a professional guide is involved. It will be very helpful if a system that provides all information needed to visit a city is available. This system should gather data that are presented in brochures, tourist guides and on web pages. A search mechanism and path finding feature are also one of the requirements for this system. It can be difficult for some persons to find paths that allow visiting particular places, but if these persons have some proposals for trip an appropriate system will be very helpful for them in my opinion. With users having some suggestion is a good base to start organizing and optimizing trips and it is easier to change something than make it from beginning. I designed an application that fulfils most of those needs. It provide an information like maps of a city, parking places, points of interest (museums, art galleries, restaurants, monuments and similar) with their description, costs of entrance, time needed to visit and at least one photo of these places. The system is also able to find path using user criteria and to display them. This is only a proposition for users and it can be used as something for beginning while planning. The user will get few propositions of trips. He can display the path on map and read about objects which are included in each trip. Every path has calculated length and time. It is not optimal and probably the user changes something but as it was said it is only a proposition and some base plan for the trip. This thesis concentrates on the system that was designed. It also determines which of its aspects were implemented, which should be added in near future or commercial version and which are difficult to implement. To better understand environment, possibilities and requirements hardware and software aspects of mobile devices must be taken into consideration. This document is organized into 7 chapters. The next chapter presents three existing path finding systems. Basic functionalities and a scope of those systems are presented in second chapter. The third chapter is an introduction to mobile devices. It presents hardware restrictions which must be taken into consideration when building such systems. It contains information about processors and memory of mobile devices and also mentions navigation systems. In that chapter some basic information about current mobile operating systems are presented. It is a background for the rest work. It shows problems that have to be solved by mobile platform programmers while developing software. The fourth chapter refers about goals of this master thesis in details and presents a proposed solution for planning and organizing trips. It consists from two parts: description of how to select objects using some criteria and, secondly, how to find the best path to visit all of them in specified time. At the end future work and conclusions are presented

Intelligent Tourist Information System

Chapters: 1 - 5
Delivery: Email

Number of Pages: 58

Price: 5000 NGN

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