XML-based Integration of GIS and Heterogeneous Tourism Information

With the tremendous growth of the Web, a broad spectrum of tourism information is already distributed over various Web sites. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection it is inevitable to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. In a first step towards a comprehensive integration of tourism data the official Austrian destination information and booking system TIScover is extended with a flexible data interchange adapter which allows interchange of structured data with other tourism information systems. Beside the problem of distributed data sources tourists are also confronted with differences concerning information presentation on various Web sites. To cope with this problem our approach extensively uses maps for data presentation and federation of multiple structured and semi-structured tourism information sources on the Web. For this purpose touristic maps are generated dynamically including data resulting from database queries. This concept allows a clear and meaningful representation of up-to-date tourism information embedded in a geographical context.