Monitoring procedures for tourism using RFID and Google Maps technologies

Due to global e-Map on Internet, tourists can easily and precisely find the position that they are interested in. Using one kind of tag-based microchips, a RFID system is usually combined with back-end information systems to sense the tag information with internet-connected readers through wireless transmission. Recently, since the number of travel websites is under unceasing development and increasing, tourists can deeply understand scenic sites before their trips. However, the travel agents capture tourist information, only from the leading tour guides on trip, which is an ineffective monitoring procedure. This research discusses how to combine RFID technology with Google Maps in traveling applications, and provides two-way monitoring procedures with an e-map traveling system. As proposed scheme, RFID tags are attached to tourists using RFID wireless radio frequency identification technology. Four monitoring components are designed to deliver tourists´ tag information so that travel agents can automatically track their tours and tourists by remote monitoring information from the mobile and spot-based RFID readers instead of tour guides. The monitoring information of tracked tours and tourists will be represented in internet-based Google Maps. By comparing with the existing traveling websites, this paper discusses advantages and disadvantages of the procedures proposed.