A GIS system for tourism management

In order to improve all aspects of tourism in any country, it is vital to utilize all available state-of-the art computing and IT technologies and facilities. In this paper, we present our work in this regard as applied to Jordan. Our objective is to build a geographic information system (GIS) model for tourism industries (services) from one side and for officials and conservationist of the historic sites on the other side. This will encourage tourism by providing tourists with all the needed services such as: maps, routes, restaurants, hospitals, Web site with virtual reality models of different monuments and sites. Officials concerned with tourism industries including the private sector, will have an important role in improving and planning the future of their industries using GIS capabilities. Moreover, GIS will enable us to have up-to-date information, recommendation and orientation to tourists to guarantee their security in case of emergency which is a great concern to them. In our GIS creation we included tourism maps scale (1:50,00) and (1:10,000), Ikonos, and spot satellite images to allow maximum information. The GIS covered all cities which have important historical sites including: Amman, Jerash, Madaba, Aqaba and Petra. Existing and newly gathered data were used to enrich our GIS system in order to offer all kind of services to both planners and tourists. The created GIS system will enable the future usage of all modern location-based services. We present here and in depth study for accurate 3D modeling of each historic monument for conservation and registration purposes which was done by our group with international cooperation. Results will be included in the GIS system to enrich it and to allow inside visits to the great ancient history of the sites through a Web site.