Personalized Custom Map Service for Travel Planning
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Chen, Y.; 2Li, M.; 3Ye, H.
1ZHENGZHOU INSTITUTE OF SURVEYING AND MAPPING Email: cyfbeijing@163.com
2ZHENGZHOU INSTITUTE OF SURVEYING AND MAPPING Email: 840484335@qq.com
3UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA Email: hiy5064@gmail.com
Abstract
An itinerary is necessary for a tourist before a trip, but creating an efficient and economic trip plan is often a difficult and time-consuming task. In order to make travel plans, in addition to the traditional travel guidebooks, most tourists search online for travel-related information, namely, from official travel websites, blogs and tweets. In the era of big data, the travel information on the internet is growing explosively. There are a lot of travelogues and travel diaries online written by tourists who want to share their travel experiences with their family and friends after they finish the trip or even on their way. The diversity of the data sources makes it difficult for tourists to extract useful information and make their own travel plans efficiently. Meanwhile, conventional itineraries often list travel-related information in tabular or textual form, only a few travel sites provide travel planning in the form of maps like Plnnr. Therefore, visualizing the itineraries on the map is also a challenging task. In order to solve these problems, the study of personalized travel service is attracting attention from both travel agencies and GIS researchers in terms of customization and recommendation. Up to now, personalized recommendation service for travel has received great attention, but few personalized custom service has been implemented, especially personalized custom map service combining travel service with map visualization. Personalized map service for travel aims to satisfy tourists’ personalized requirements for travel-related information and represent it on maps; it realizes the individuation of map service resources, map service modes, map service contents, and map expression. Personalized map service for travel has two main service modes: customization and recommendation. Trip planning and automatic itinerary mapping are the two most important issues for both modes. Comparing with recommendation service, personalized custom map service needs more detailed trip preferences information provided by tourists; hence building the conceptual model of itineraries which reflects the travel-related personalized elements is very important. In this paper, we developed a set of methods to generate personalized travel plans automatically and provide custom itinerary map service based on user preferences. This method includes six steps: 1. Building a conceptual model of itineraries by identifying the basic needs of different types of tourists from user survey and travelogue analysis. The conceptual model finally becomes a requirement form of travel for a specific tourist and a specific trip. 2. Building an itinerary database from travelogues on the internet using text mining technology. The main elements of the conceptual model provide the keywords for Chinese word segmentation. 3. Designing itinerary templates according to the conceptual model. 4. Collecting the needs of specific users by asking them to fill out the preference form. 5. Searching the itinerary from our database that matches the needs of the users. 6. Visualizing the customized itinerary on the map and returning the result maps to the users. Finally, we developed a prototype system of personalized custom map service and evaluated the efficiency of our method.
Keywords
personalized map service; itinerary map; travel planning