Tour-Guide: Providing Location-Based Tourist Information on Mobile Phones

Nowadays, people’s consumption structure is improving steadily. There has been a large increase in the number of people out on tours, for the sake of recreation and entertainment. Tourism is the strongest and largest industry in the global economy. It has played a significant role in boosting the city's economy and social employment. In the traditional tourism industry, tourist information is obtained mainly through newspaper, magazines, radio and other simple ways. It can not update and utilize timely. The poor situation of the real-time performance failed to meet people’s growing demand. The emergence of the Internet makes up for this shortfall. Detailed texts, pictures, videos and other guidance information are provided, so people can better understand the tourist attractions and make decision objectively. However, this approach also has some drawbacks. Since most people use personal computer to access Internet, they can not get information anywhere and anytime. People need intelligent, professional and personalized user-centric mobile information services. The integration of the Internet and mobile communication is the main tend of the information industry. With the development of the mobile communication technology, mobile telephone has been used not only as communication tool, but also as entertainment and office tools, providing ubiquitous information access, leisure and entertainment, helping people keep in contact with their friends and so on. With portable, wireless mobile devices to access Internet has become a new requirement. To use information technology to publicize and manage tourism, fully making use of mobile telephone to provide guidance information for people’s tour is becoming imperative equirement of modern tour. The prevalence of mobile phones and the pervasiveness of the wireless networks make mobile a promising platform for personal ubiquitous computing. Current mobile services are enhanced with location-aware features, providing the user with better use experience. A great number of mobile phone applications appeared recently, many of which are location-related [1, 2, 3]. Location-dependent services, which answer location-related queries, are an important class of context-aware applications. With kinds of promising pplications, like local information obtain (traffic condition, navigation messages and so on) and neighboring environment queries, such as finding the nearest restaurant, location-dependent query service will soon become an necessary part of our daily lives. We will describe the design, implementation and deployment of a location-based application, named Tour- Guide, with the mobile phone as a platform. This application permitted users to get tour guidance information they need anytime and anywhere. In particular, the tourist data could be browsed or queried through an Internet map service such as Google Maps