Advances in Customized Open Source Web Mapping: A Geographic Information System (GIS) Application for Tourism Planning and Marketing.
详细信息
文摘
Global trends in Internet use, along with technologies for creating and sharing geographic information have led to the rapid development of web-based mapping and web-based Geographic Information Systems GIS). These developments occur as both generic mapping and discipline specific applications and are created with both proprietary and open source software. For discipline specific applications, the ability to create and share geographic information requires both a thorough understanding of the discipline and a detailed knowledge of the skills and tools necessary for delivering the appropriate mapping content. This research focuses on the development of a web mapping system for tourism planning and marketing. To establish context for the tourism web mapping system, a study involving geology tourism operations at 39 North Carolina NC) State Parks was conducted and the results are published as a book chapter &ldquo；Geotourism potential in North Carolina: perspectives from interpretation at state parks&rdquo； in Geotourism: The Tourism of Geology and Landscape. Next the investigation focused on the web mapping system software required to implement a tourism specific planning and marketing application. This was accomplished by working with two NC state government agencies to deploy an open source, transferable, web mapping environment. These successful applications are described in the Transactions in GIS article &ldquo；Who&rsquo；s Watching Your Food? A Flexible Framework for Public Health Monitoring.&rdquo； The first application supports the NC Department of Health and Human Services&rsquo；s goal to visualize and query all state-regulated food service facilities as well as provide analysis tools crucial for contamination tracking and food recalls. The second application developed for NC Division of Forest Resources allows landowners to identify the forested areas they wish to inventory or manage by drawing and editing polygon features to represent forest stands. Each of these applications exemplifies user driven customization, that when emulated in the tourism industry would benefit both professionals and researchers. Combining these efforts i.e., the tourism operation study and the web mapping applications) led to the development of a comprehensive web mapping system designed specifically for tourism planning and marketing. A common need of tourism professionals and researchers is to evaluate site-specific tourism demand by mapping customers who may be geographically disperse. Typically, a GIS provides the best options for preforming these tasks. Unfortunately, traditional desktop GIS can be complex and expensive. Using web-based open source GIS software that is customized for tourism objectives can save users time and money, increase accuracy and efficiency in planning and help improve resource management. The open source web mapping application MapMyClients) developed in this study addresses these needs. MapMyClients gives users the ability to easily determine and visualize the spatial distribution of U.S. client origins and visitation patterns, and it provides other relevant tourism specific and general demographic information. This customized, easy-to-use, open source application reduces user expense and allows for broad accessibility via web delivery. The findings of this research improve the empirical understanding of open source web mapping as a medium to achieve discipline-specific goals and provide an immediate tool for the tourism industry.