Monday, February 16, 2004

We need better maps III

In this article, they show how a system used in natural parks can provide direction information to mobile tourists. It is interesting for different reasons:
- First, I did not realize Zope could be installed on a palm sized device.
- Second, it is not wireless, a GPS system does the trick. No need for a complex infrastructure. If one were to develop a solution for Paris, there is certainly a market for telling people the story of a particular place. Nearly every street in this town seems to have a link to a particular part of the History. The bar next door for instance is where most french people think WWI was not stopped. An interesting conclusion from this article is that only one third of people are interested in paying for this service. One particular instance of using this type of service in paris is to match the tourist nationality with events/places of interest to their own history. For instance, if you go to the Palais Royal, you can find the place where Bonaparte signed off on the Louisiana Treaty, the place where immigrants from eastern europe decided to join France in WWI to fight the germans, the place where Bolivar lived before going back to South America.....Each of these events has only a particular interest to only certain people of specific nationalities and no paper map could do the trick...

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