MTA: Mobile Tourist Agent (page 1 of 3)

When travelling and visiting new places, tourists are mobile as they wander around and follow tours through landscapes and cities they are in general unfamiliar with and which they like to discover and learn more about. The mobile commerce sector is set to witness phenomenal growth. Modern technologies in the field of communications allow us to design systems that provide Location Based Services (LBS) for mobile application. We present a mobile tourist information system named MTA (Mobile Tourist Agent) that implements a tourist guide for users, in the UAE, especially Dubai. MTA provides Location Based Service and performs functions based on the geographical information of the user about points of interest like hotels and restaurants nearby and show this information on an interactive map. MTA provides additional services that interest and help the tourists like an online up-to-date currency converter, weather forecast and prayer times. We try to show how the distribution of the client/server application logic meets the technical constraints imposed by mobile networks and devices in mobile application development.

Keywords: Location Based Services, Tourist Information System, Electronic Guide, Mobile Application, Tourism in Dubai.

1 Introduction

The inspiration of this project came about when we were thinking of something that is original, utilizes many technologies, can be commercially implemented with the least expenses. It is almost certain that a new visitor to Dubai will have next to no prior experience navigating around. We thought of the sector or tourism and tourists to Dubai as our targeted users and sector since tourism is one of the main sources of income in Dubai. We focus foremost on enhancing the experience of Dubai as a place to live or visit. We aim to open aspects of the city characters for the benefit of entertainment and tourism, giving Dubai a technology base that would continue to lunch new consumer and commercial business services in the future.

Currently, electronic tourist guides are two types, web-based guides and mobilebased guides. This separation of the two types is due to the different platforms, technology, transmission speeds on each environment. However, modern technologies in the field of communications and the availability of wireless transmission media allow us to design a distributed client/server tourist information system named MTA (Mobile Tourist Agent). Our system uses the mobile device or PDA as a terminal for receiving information from a web server that acts as central point to coordinate and manages the interaction between the points and source of information.



MTA can be used either while walking through the city or indoor in the user's place of staying. In the first case( Fig. 1), the system offers interactive map for the city of Dubai with the ability to navigate and zoom in/out and to view the points of interest such as hotels, restaurants, cinema theatres, embassies and other points that may interest the tourist. The system provides Location Based Services (LBS) by showing the user's location on the map an showing the points that are within a specific distance from them. The user can click on the points to get more information about the selected point. In addition to the LBS, MTA provides additional services that help the tourist during his visit like a universal currency converter, weather forecast and daily prayer times.



For the other case (Fig.