Development and analysis of a network-based multi-media tour guiding system

This paper presents the development of a multi-media tour guiding system, which is implemented on a local area network. One of the most difficult problems for designing the tour guiding system is to decide the routes from places to places. Since the multi-media data files are usually very large, it is sometimes desirable to decrease the amount of data by finding the common sub-paths for different routes. However, if the decrease of data is over-concerned, some unpleasant results may occur. The routes may become too long, and hence users are guided to walk (or drive) through a very long way to his (or her) destinations. Therefore, it is a trade-off to make both the lengths of routes and the amount of data being acceptable. The authors not only present the tour guiding system, but also propose a new method to optimize the amount of multi-media data under some physical constraints