A tourist route search system based on Web information and the visibility of scenic sights

With the growth of massive information on the Web, information recommendation and filtering techniques have been studied intensively. Traditional route search systems, which can be considered one of information recommendation systems, usually calculate the shortest path in terms of time or distance. Recently, route search 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 tourist navigation systems. To automatically retrieve tourist spots, we propose a personalized tourist spot recommendation technique using the Web information. To find a route with attractive scenery, scores for paths based on the visibility of scenic sights are calculated and utilized. We tested the effectiveness of the proposed system by using a prototype of the system.