Tour recommendation system based on web information and GIS

Information recommendation and filtering techniques have been studied intensively. Traditional tour recommendation systems, which can be considered one of information recommendation systems, usually calculate the shortest path in terms of time or distance. Recently, tour recommendation systems for more general purposes have become an important research topic. In this paper we propose an efficient tourist route search system which not only recommends the path simply connecting several tourist spots, but also recommends the path with beautiful scenic sights. We focus on the visibility of scenic sights between one tourist spot and another, which is an important factor for choosing a driving route, but has not been considered in traditional tour recommendation systems. To automatically retrieve tourist spots, we propose a personalized tourist spot recommendation technique using the Web information. Although, for some regions, databases of the famous spots exist and are published, such regions are limited and usually outdated. Our method automatically extracts spots from the Web, thus our system is versatile and up-to-date for large regions. To find a route with attractive scenery, we calculate scores for paths based on the visibility of scenic sights. After generating route candidates using GIS, a 3D virtual space is constructed and the Z-Buffer method is used to decide the visibility of scenic sights for each route candidate. We implemented a prototype and tested the effectiveness of the system.