SmartGuide Tourism Information Portal

Posted by Gareth on Oct 23rd, 2009 | Comments

The Tourist Problem

See it at www.africantourismportal.com

Tourism is, by its very nature, the act of deliberately taking oneself to somewhere foreign and experiencing the new, the different and the unknown.  That said, most tourists are not interested in stumbling blindly – they want to impose some sort of structure on their journey before they begin.  At the least, they book hotels and accommodation.  Many choose a few particular locations they want to visit.  Some even organise complete itineraries, planning their trips down to the hour.

For all of these people, there is a common problem: what is there to do where I’m going?  Frequently, the primary source of information is a tour book or travel guide – a glossy summary of the most popular attractions.  This information is flat, static, and offers little context.  An improvement is to use a tour operator – an agency who can help to guide you to local attractions and areas of interest, and customise suggestions to your interests and accommodation choices.

Wouldn’t it be even better, then, if you could explore the area yourself?  Whilst map-based products that show hotels or tourist locations have existed for a while, they have until now focused too much on either selling accommodation or on highlighting the tourist attractions.

Our Solution

This is where SmartGuide and New Media Labs have collaborated to bring these two worlds together – building a rich, interactive map that shows visitors where they can stay, and pairs it with a wealth of information about the area they are visiting.  As an interactive map product, tourists gain immediate understanding of the spatial relationships between locations.  They can explore at their leisure, consuming images, descriptions, audio and video about points.

The product we have built acts as a hub for a multitude of players in the tourism space.  Information, locations and content feed into it from local tourism agencies and location promoters.  Tourism and accommodation operators feed their own unique images/video/points into it, improving the quality of the content and highlighting features they consider the most valuable.  Tourists use the map to explore, learn and decide where they wish to visit.  They locate accommodation, restaurants and activities in advance, and feed their choices and preferences back to their tour guides or their queries directly to responsible parties.

TIP playing a promotional video

One of the dominant problems in providing a system like this is in developing and maintaining a high quality repository of information.  This is a task that is poorly suited to tour operators themselves, and individual local tourism bureaus cannot provide either the necessary funding or a wide enough body of information.  Here, a dedicated provider like SmartGuide has the necessary contacts and experience to compile a body of knowledge that can support both the regional agencies and the tour operators.

When dealing with as much content as this, it becomes necessary to manage the volume of information being presented at any one time.  Especially when people are viewing a map, overloading them with points can rapidly becoming intimidating.  SmartGuide and New Media Labs tackled this from a number of directions.  We manage the display of points, making them visible and hiding them at appropriate zoom levels.  This allows us to begin by presenting high-level information and a minimal selection of locations when the zoom is pulled far out, and still have detailed, local content if a visitor chooses to zoom into an area.  We further extended this by allowing visitors to bring categorised content up earlier.  This helps people locate their particular interests quickly - beaches, golf courses, family attractions, restaurants - all of these can be highlighted and explored at will.  Lastly, all points on the map have a context-specific icon, which makes it easy to distinguish the general nature of a location at a glance, and without having to click or interact with it.

Exploring Beaches and Golf Courses

This information is fed to tourists through a fully interactive Adobe Flash application, which leverages the exceptional quality of Google Maps for Flash to provide a geospatial display of tourist attractions.  The user interface is built to support simple reskinning by operators, allowing them to imbed the application into their own pages with a fully matching “look and feel”.

TIP reskinned for Southern Destinations

Uploading a path from a KML file

Obviously, managing all of this content requires tools that are up to the job.  Here, New Media Labs built a complete content management solution that allows SmartGuide and their licensed Operators to update and maintain the ever increasing number of locations.  The content manager is designed to make the job of sorting and filtering through the tens of thousands of locations easy.  It fully supports filtering and sorting, and allows the user to customise the information on display.  This allows SmartGuide and their Operators to “build their own interface” for the job at hand.  The content manager uses a combination of direct field editing and custom content-specific editors to always present the most useful interface for the moment.  The content manager allows them to not only monitor points, but also to customise the display of recommendations, guides, routes and layers.

It supports importing content from KML documents and route files, and adding additional regional/location information to points through a reverse geocoding service.  It even allows SmartGuide to generate customised HTML pages for their clients on-the-fly, allowing them to run their business without needing to call on New Media Labs for technical support.

Checking up on Sky Diving

The content manager isn’t limited to in-office use, either.  It is fully supported across the internet - and this often leads to SmartGuide consultants taking their laptops with them on the road, and updating content directly from the local offices of tourism agencies.

Underlying Technology

New Media Labs has a firm belief in using “the right tool for the job”.  As such, a variety of systems were used together to build the tourism portal.

The front-end application was developed using Adobe Flex technology.  Here, our challenge was to deliver a richly interactive application that would behave consistently across the multitude of browsers currently available.  It would need to provide a user experience that set it apart from the majority of Google Maps-based products currently available.  It would need to consume back-end service feeds and orchestrate them to produce a compelling, responsive interactive map.  Lastly, it would need to be customisable and skinnable enough that operators looking to integrate it fully into their websites had the flexibility to do so.

Our decision to use Adobe Flex was informed by all of these aspects.  With Flash penetration at over 95%, we felt comfortable that it had the portability we needed.  ActionScript CSS gave us a good tool to separate the presentation logic from the underlying behaviour, and native support of web services ensured that we could access our back-end content seamlessly.

Even better – it took us only 4 weeks to build the front-end application!  Our initial prototyping efforts using Microsoft Silverlight meant that we could focus on ensuring the user experience was top notch, instead of simultaneously developing the application logic in conjunction with the user interface.

Developing TIP in Flex Builder

The back end servers run web services hosted inside of IIS 7, running on Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008 databases.  Whilst we investigated building the services with some of the more popular open-source technologies (PHP, Ruby on Rails), we knew that the long-term strategy for the system would require extensive back-end integration with the systems of existing content providers.  Here, we felt that services built using .NET would give us the best combination of performance, flexibility and rapid development on this project.  Especially, we viewed the introduction of the geographic data types within SQL Server 2008 as being important for the ongoing maintenance and development of the system.

The Content Manager was implemented using Microsoft Silverlight (SL3).  Here, we wanted a powerful and responsive interface that would allow the user to perform complex data manipulation quickly.  Microsoft Silverlight was a natural choice – the multitude of user controls provided helped to massively reduce the amount of work necessary to build a content manager.  By allowing the client to work with the data directly in their browser we allowed them to be much more productive than they could have been with a traditional page based CMS system.

Browsing and updating point information

Obviously, the CMS needed a way to update the primary data store – we evaluated using a traditional web-service based approach, but we wanted something that gave us a good mix between easy extensibility and strong validation and typing.  In the end, we built a generic dynamic update system that relies heavily on shared WCF contracts and reflection.  It allows us to provide continual, as-you-edit updates and synchronisation between the CMS user interface and the backing data store.