Vector Tourist Maps - Interactive Access to Web-based Tourism Information

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.