International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B-YF. Istanbul 2004
reflect this requirement. For example, it is possible to search for
hotels in a city. This might be sufficient for small cities, but of
course it will no deliver satisfying results for bigger cities, a
more detailed location specification is needed,
A geographic search lets the tourist quickly search the database
using geographic criteria. In the Tourism Information System of
Side, a geographic search is a mixed query which combines
tourism attributes and geographic criteria to search for “What is
where?”. Here “What”: represents attributes of touristic objects
“Where”: represents the geographic space that the touristic
place covered.
Some spatial analysis operations are needed to provide easy
search operations to a tourist. These operations are geographic
criterions like; nearness, distance and region. Nearness means;
to search for nearest touristic object to given point. Distance is
to find elements located within a specified distance to a given
point. Region means; to search for objects located within a
region marked on a map. A geographic search can be
categorized into three different search types:
Type 1 Examples
Location of | Show where the “Club Yek" is located
specific object Show the location of the “Perissa” hotel
Nearest object | Which is the nearest hotel to “
to a specific Aspendos"
object Which sight has the smallest distance to
the “Bella” hotel
Which is the nearest bus station to the
“Penguen” hotel
Which pharmacy is located next to the
“Side museum”
All objects | Show all hotels which are located
which don’t within a distance of 500 meter to the
exceed a | “Antik Theatre”
definite distance | Show all exchange office with in a
to distance of a 500 m to the "Asterya"
a specific object | hotel
Table 2. The Object Based Search, Which Enables The Search
To Certain Tourist Objects.
Type 2 Examples
Build a map with all hotels in “Side”
Show all theatres in "Side"
Search for objects in a
city, region, etc.
Show all hotels in the marked region
Show all sights which are located in
the marked region
Search for objects in a
marked circle region
Show all hotels which are located
within a distance of 1 km to the point
marked on the map
Show all tourist information offices
within a distance of 500 m to selected
location
Objects search within
a distance to a desired
location
Table 3. Area Based Search, The Area Which Allows The
Search For Objects In Geographic Relation
Type3 Examples
Combination of | Build a map with all 3-star hotels in the
object search selected region
And area based | Build a map with all 3-star hotels
search within a distance of 500 m to the
selected location
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Table 4. The Combination Of First Second Search Approach,
Enlarged With Additional Objects Criteria Like Hotel Category
And Availability.
3.3. Geographic Query Work Flow
The touristic information system including building road,
touristic places, historical places, photos of hotels and the
situation of these points for instance; the distance between hotel
and the center of city or airport, the capacity of hotels, the
number of stars of hotels, was collected from the maps and non-
graphic data from municipality and internet.
To perform a geographic search for tourism objects, each
tourism object needs a geographic representation. The
geographic coordinates of tourism objects are stored in the GIS
database.
! List of
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retum / we À
ap date A KA 3
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GIS data query
Figure 3. Geographic Query
This figure summarizes the workflow of the geographic query.
The user performs a request, which is transmitted to the
integrated GIS system. The GIS system queries the spatial
database to get the map data and to create a list of tourism
objects which are located in the queried area and fulfil the
criteria. Each object returned will be completed with tourism
data like object name, category of hotel, availability of hotel
rooms, etc. Afterwards the transformation module converts the
characteristics into the required representation. The
transformation and integration module integrates the GIS data
with the tourism data, identifies the layers, and defines the
representation of the touristic objects (Mahajan, 2001).
3.4 Integrated GIS
When analysing the benefits of the GIS integration with
internet, two different roles arise in the context of the user.
Administration- To position objects onto a map, Application-
To search for tourist objects The following figure shows the
interaction of the user roles and the integrated GIS system.
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