IMTS- an Interactive Multimodal Tourist-Guide System

Today´s tourists expect to get easily accessible information about a city which is mostly spatial in nature and the information content is huge. Spatial information or Geographical Information System (GIS) data can be precisely represented and understood by an interactive map. Interaction with GIS data is a complex task and not easily accessible. This paper introduces IMTS (Interactive Multimodal Tourist-Guide System), which is implemented to provide the tourist with such an easy access to get information about a city. IMTS is a scalable map based multimodal tourist guide system. It has navigation control, searching capabilities for hotels, restaurants, attractions, shortest path etc and has more natural multimodal interaction by mouse, keyboard and speech. The outputs are locations, routes on map and contain rich and interactive information like description in form of synthesized speech or text, link and picture. For testing of the system the geospatial data of Allahabad city in India has been used. System integrates Google Map API interfaces, Microsoft .NET Speech SDK and Web 2.0 technologies like JavaScript, AJAX, and Asp.Net with .NET technology. This paper presents technical details of the IMTS system including interaction design and evaluation of the web based tourist guide system.