Evaluation of GoogleMap as source of tourist spatial information

The availability of online GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps has provided a new source of spatial information to tourists. However these maps have yet to be evaluated of their effectiveness. This has challenged scholars to further investigate methods of evaluating geographic information retrieval. Therefore the main objective of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of GoogleMap as one of the online GIS maps providers. System testing is used to assess three different study areas namely, Shah Alam, Kuala Lumpur and Taiping. To facilitate this assessment a query list consists of 78 keywords are gathered. Precision and recall measures are also used as an evaluation method. Findings show that GoogleMap Malaysia is bias towards places that are well-known and fed with abundant information by users. Therefore area that has more information and bigger in size has higher score levels of recall and precision percentage as compared to smaller and isolated areas that have lesser information.