MANAGING TOURISM SERVICES OF EAST BLACK SEA REGION OF TURKEY WITH MAPS

A.C. Aydinoglu, T. Yomralioglu

Karadeniz Technical University, Dept. of Geodesy and Photog. Eng., GISLab, Turkey

arifcagdas@ktu.edu.tr

Tourism contributes to economic and social development of a country and has emerging potential. Traditional methods to disseminate tourism-related information are inadequate. Therefore, building Tourism Management Information System (TMIS) with the supporting of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contributes tourism management services and users to reach the information easily and use it efficiently. TMIS should be produced to support Turkey’s development as a developing country. Due to East Black Sea region of Turkey has some socio-economic problems, tourism can be an important industry for supporting the region’s developments.

For building TMIS, a sustainable database model compliant with Culture Assets Automation System of Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey was designed with considering tourism functions. This database includes natural, recreational, and historic tourism entities, transportation facilities, tourism facilities, and etc. The data convenient with the model was collected for East Black Sea Region of Turkey on GIS environment. TMIS model with standardized database and cartographic elements enables to produce applications for tourism services and can be used for different tourism applications as a model. After TMIS was built for East Black Sea region of Turkey, decision maker and user oriented products were produced. User oriented products include tourism maps like wall paper, folded maps, tourism guide, and web based tourism applications with various cartographic capacity. With TMIS, decision makers can find optimal solutions to complex problems like where a tourism center should be built.