VECTOR TOURIST MAPS: INTERACTIVE ACCESS TO WEB-BASED TOURISM INFORMATION

Abstract
With the World Wide Web, people have access to more tourism information than ever before. However, too much information from too many sources has caused an information overload. Accessing information on the Internet has become less a question of determining whether the information is out there, but rather, in what form, and how to find it. Tourists have problems to find what they are looking for, especially in reference to the geographic position of the object and its surroundings. In most cases it is not satisfying to find a nice hotel without a reference to restaurants, sights or event locations located nearby. The approach presented in this paper starts from the user needs, to present the tourism object in geographic context on interactive tourist maps in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) the upcoming standard for two dimensional vector graphics in the Web. Maps cope with the two dimensional capabilities of human vision and present the information in a compact and easy to read way.

Franz Pühretmair
Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing(FAW)
University of Linz
Austria

Biography
Franz P hretmair (fp@faw.uni-linz.ac.at) was born 1971 in Grieskirchen, Austria. He studied at the Johannes Kepler University Linz computer science and data engineering and obtained his degrees in 1997. Since 1997 he works as research assistant and project manager at thenbsp; Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. During his work at the FAW he was involved in numerous projects directly with industrial and business partners as well as European Community founded projects. He was speaker at various international conferences (CAiSE, EC-Web, and ENTER).

Roland Wagner

Director of the Institute of Knowledge Processing
FAW
University of Linz
Austria

Biography
Roland Wagner (rwagner@faw.uni-linz.ac.at) is Professor for Information Systems at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz. He is director of the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW). He is managing various industrial and research projects in the areas of information systems, knowledge-based systems, neural networks and electronic commerce. He is teaching in the area of Information Systems. His current research interests are new database developments, object oriented database design, data mining and data warehousing. He is member of the ACM, OCG (Austrian Computer Socienty), GI (German Society of Computer Science), IEEE Computer Society, Board of DEXA, ÖGI (Austrian Society of Informatic) and ÖMG (Autrian Mathematical Society). He is referee of various International Conferences, author/editor of 8 books and more than 100 reviewed proceedings and scientific journals.