The importance of Multimedia and Geographical Information System
Technologies in the Tourism Industry
Salah BENABDALLAH
Head of the Decision Support Systems Department, Institut R¦gional
des
Sciences Informatiques et des T¦l¦communications (IRSIT). Address:
B.P. 212,
Cit¦ Mahrajne, 1082 Tunis, TUNISIA. Tel: (216-1) 800.122. Fax: (216-1)
787.827.
email: salah@hanoun.rsinet.tn
Karima BOUNEMRA BEN SOLTANE
Chairman and Managing Director of Institut R¦gional des Sciences
Informatiques et des T¦l¦communications (IRSIT). Address: B.P.
212, Cit¦
Mahrajne, 1082 Tunis, TUNISIA. Tel: (216-1) 800.122. Fax: (216-1) 787.827.
email: BOUNEMRA@irsit.rnrt.tn
21/3/96
Introduction :
The latest advances in computer industry especially in hardware has led
to the development of the Multimedia and Geographical Information System
(GIS) technologies. Multimedia provides communications using text, graphics,
animation, and video. The combination of several media often results in
a powerful and richer presentation of information and ideas to stimulate
interest and enhance information retention. GIS is a powerful set of tools
for collecting, storing, retrieving, transforming, managing, analyzing,
and displaying spatial data. The integration of those technologies will
improve the services offered to the tourism market.
This paper presents the importance of Multimedia and GIS technologies in
the tourism industry and their use to build a powerful distributed tourism
information system.
GIS and Multimedia for the Tourism Industry
One of the problems encountered in the tourism industry is the quick update
and maintenance of the data. Data concerning geographical beauties, culture
heritage, monuments, hotels, amusement parks, and so on are continuously
collected by local tourism authorities. The current procedures for publishing
those data are not on line with the need of a prompt usage of the data themselves.
They are in fact made available through traditional channels like booklets,
brochures and so forth. Using Multimedia and GIS in the tourism oriented
application market will make it possible to deliver those data also in electronic
formats using new media like CD-ROM. However, any necessary update of the
data requires, today, a new delivery. This introduces extra costs that can
be avoided with the availability of Multimedia database managed locally
and available, through Internet, to the application developers.
Combining these two technologies will allow the final user of tourist applications
:
- to provide new classes of functionalities based on vector data (route
optimisation, adjancy, proximity calculus, etc.) in addition to the multimedia
functionalities,
- to provide an authoring system for supporting the automatic generation
of a wide spectrum of tourism applications based on Multimedia and GIS technology,
and
- to develop a Multimedia/GIS distributed database.
In conclusion, the combination of these technologies will definitely enables
the local tourism authorities to update the data easily, efficiently and
with low cost.