A HYPERMEDIA TOURIST GUIDE1

A. Tsalgatidou, M. Spiliopoulou, K. Apostolaki, I. Roussou, M. Hatzopoulos

University of Athens, Dept. of Informatics,
TYPA Buildings, ILISIA GR-157 71, Greece
Abstract
A hypermedia model is presented for the management of extendible multimedia information envisaged
for tourist applications. The information is modelled according to the object-oriented methodology and
organised into aggregation and specialisation / generalisation hierarchies, containing data that can be
further enriched by authorised users - typically travel agents. The end-user conceives a hypermedia
network, in which visited nodes are traced and navigation paths can be constructed on the fly.

1 Introduction

Tourist applications present an interesting case in the development of information systems, due to the
multitude of tasks that have to be performed and the wide range of facilities that have to be provided
by such systems. The demands put by the information rich and highly interactive tourist guidance
environment, cannot be handled by conventional development techniques and alternate solutions have
to be sought in the emerging technological area of hypermedia.
Hypermedia systems are complex information stores with flexible structure, often comprising of
thousands of links and nodes, which enable the user to freely navigate through these nodes or to follow
a guided route predefined by the system author. Such systems are very useful for tourist applications.
Additionally, hypermedia systems have been found suitable to fields such as office automation,
medicine, education and training [11]. From a knowledge point of view, these systems comprise
mainly of three components [12]: organisational knowledge, which describes the ways knowledge is
organised in a hypermedia system, domain knowledge, which is composed of rules and facts about the
application domain, and contextual knowledge, which describes the way that information in the
hypermedia will be used.
An important issue in the hypermedia application development is the need of new design models
specific to the features of hypermedia. The various hypermedia development environments, like
GuideTM, g-IBIS [5], HyperCardTM, KMS [1] etc. that have emerged in the market, use different
approaches and design models. Thus, HyperCard and Guide use linear structures as building blocks for
the creation of hypernetwork structures. KMS uses hierarchical structures to organise the hyperdocuments, but it also allows cross-hierarchical links, inducing in this way a complex topology in the
1

Appeared in Proceedings of ENTER-94, Springer-Verlag, 1994, pp. 72-79

hypernetwork. g-IBIS explicitly models the semantics of the domain under study, by assuming a well
defined theory of the design process and by providing a set of specific node and link types that
represent conceptual objects in the domain model. The design of hypermedia applications is better
handled by the HDM methodology [7] which follows an authoring-in-the-large approach. HDM
allows the description of hypermedia applications in terms of a schema which defines the structural,
the navigational and the semantic properties of a class of applications, an instance of a schema, which
defines the actual information structures according to the schema prescriptions, and the access
structures, which define the entry points for navigating in the hyperdocuments along predefined paths.
According to this approach, HDM primitives are totally independent from specific development/
delivery environments; thus, the same HDM description of an application, can be compiled towards
different hypermedia environments, e.g. HyperCard, KMS etc.
Known problems of hypermedia systems are the cognitive load, the user disorientation, and the
possibility for the user to be lost in the hyperspace of links [4]. However, if a considerate approach is
followed for the development of such a system, these problems may be moderated. It has been
demonstrated [6] that knowledge based approaches to organising hypermedia, may benefit users in
finding information in goal directed activities. Other approaches to solve the disorientation problem
concentrate to the user interface [13][17] and textual analysis [15]. A recent approach to this problem,
still under research, is the use of authoring tools based on hypermedia structural analysis [3].
It has become apparent now that, the use of hypermedia technology may significantly contribute to
the development of sophisticated tourist applications. When dealing with services offered to tourists by
tourist agencies, the most noticeable requirements are the storage, linking and the presentation means
of the related information, which may be in the form of text, image, video, graphics, animation or
sound. Another demanding requirement is the interactivity that has to be offered to the user. The goal
is, on one hand the creation of a complete, vivid and pleasant description of the offered holidays and
excursion programs - something that cannot be achieved in any printed brochure - and on the other
hand, the provision of means to let the tourists freely create their personalised tour.
The flexibility and the adaptability of the user interface is a very important issue stemming from the
fact that, tourists are not always certain of what exactly they want to do and their interest evolves as
they are collecting more information for the various places. Typically, a travel agent, in the beginning
of a session with a tourist, will not be able to assert what s/he may wish. The tourists' needs and
preferences are actually acquired while the agent presents the various activities and events that take
place in a certain area, the interesting sites to be visited, information about accommodation,
transportation etc. The agent may even propose certain package tours and solutions to be taken.
However, tourists may not be satisfied by the offered options.
In computer-assisted travel agencies, tourists may interactively create personalised tours. They can
also easily derive versioned tours and modify existing ones, so that they better suit their needs and
interests. It has to be noted here that, the interactivity which has to be offered by a computer-based
tourist guide does not replace the human agent. Instead, the agent's role becomes more specific and

her/his productivity is increased: s/he may help tourists to organise their journey, after they have
created a coarse or a detailed travel schedule, or s/he may provide information and advices beyond the
ones offered by the computer. Thus, a human agent spends much less time with each tourist and has
more time to deal with other activities like gathering information about other places, organising more
sophisticated tours, or spending more time to better understand the needs of customers.
Exploiting the facilities offered by this technology, we have developed a Hypermedia Tourist Guide,
denoted hereafter as HTGuide. This system models all relevant multimedia information according to
the object-oriented paradigm and organises it into a hypermedia network. It has been developed on a
Macintosh platform using HyperCard and satisfies the following requirements:
it models and maintains all the relevant multimedia information
it has an appropriate user-friendly interface for two types of users: the travel agent and the tourist
the agent may extend the model on the fly, so that
to add new information and keep the database up-to-date
to customise it to the personal interest of the tourist
the tourists are able
to explore the multimedia information by navigating the hypernetwork
to interactively create their personalised tour
to observe their personalised tour, as a simulation of the desirable journey through the interest
sites they have selected.
The following section presents the object-oriented data model of HTGuide and analyses the
maintained information. Section 3 describes the user-interface of the system presenting the information
retrieval mechanisms available to the user. The extensions that can be performed on HTGuide are
discussed in section 4, while section 5 briefly describes the implemented prototype. Finally, section 6,
concludes the results of this work.
2 The HTGuide Object-Oriented Model
2.1 Outline of the Tourist Information Modelling Mechanism
At the presentation (external) layer of the HTGuide model, information may be classified into two
categories: the first one refers to information which presents the tourist attractions and the second
describes the facilities of the attractions such as accommodation, transportation etc.
The storage (internal) layer of HTGuide has also two categories of information: the unstructured
information forming aggregates and having properties of non-conventional nature, such as images,
graphics, sound and textual documents and, conventional database objects describing well structured
information entities with numerical and string properties.
The high level objects in HTGuide correspond to the geographical analysis of a country, i.e. they are
districts, regions and towns, where isolated sites of interest (like ancient cities) also appear at the town

level. According to this analysis, a country is a composite object consisting of regions, while a region
is an aggregation of towns and sites. So, high level information is modelled as an aggregation
hierarchy. A second information classification scheme is a specialisation hierarchy. In this hierarchy,
an object belongs to a class and has a number of properties, which are either defined in this class or
inherited by its superclasses. Properties range over domains that may be either primitive ones like
integers, floats, strings, or other classes.
The information manager handles the mapping scheme of objects so that users see names meaningful
to them, without being concerned about their internal representation. The same facility will be used for
the development of a multi-lingual interface of HTGuide. Names are not unique within the application,
but the name and the type of an object constitute a unique key.
2.2 Aggregation Hierarchy
The aggregation hierarchy of HTGuide is presented in Fig. 1. The nodes in this aggregation hierarchy
are classes. The objects of these classes are composed of objects of classes of the level directly below
it. The database of HTGuide contains one object per country; this object is composed of lower level
objects, the districts, which are in turn composed of regions. The towns and other sites of a region
constitute a region object.

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Fig. 1. The aggregation hierarchy of HTGuide

The objects of the classes constituting this aggregation hierarchy are also denoted as geographical
objects hereafter. Each geographical object is accompanied by a visual presentation, which, for the
three upper levels of the aggregation hierarchy is a map and, for the leaf level is a picture. According
to the naming mechanism of HTGuide, a geographical object has a name which is the name of the area
it describes. Its visual representation has the same name, enabling in this way, the automatic linking of
an object to its map/picture
2.3 Specialisation Hierarchy
The specialisation graph of the HTGuide prototype is presented in Fig. 2. This graph is a tree of
classes, where each class, except from the root, has one parent.
The subhierarchy rooted at the class &RXQWU\ contains the aggregate objects on which the
presentation mechanism of HTGuide is based. The objects belonging to the subhierarchies rooted at

)DFLOLW\ ,PDJH and 7H[W classes, are properties of the geographical objects in this
subhierarchy.
The class 7RXU contains paths over the hypermedia network, which can be either constructed by the
user on the fly or be created by the travel agency and suggested to the users.

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2.4 Property Graph

Values of properties of objects are other objects, which may belong to a class of the specialisation
hierarchy or range over a primitive domain (integers, floats, strings), omitted from the application
schema. Thus, classes are connected to the domains of their properties which are other classes. In this
way, a (disconnected) property graph is constructed, the nodes of which are the classes appearing in
the specialisation hierarchy. The links between them are named after the names of the properties; the
source of a link is the class where the property belongs and the target of a link is the domain of this
property.

Part of the property graph of HTGuide is presented in Fig. 3, where only the most important
properties of the selected classes are shown. When the value of a property is a list of objects of the
domain, then the property name is enclosed in curly brackets, as in {map of sightseeings}, denoting
that the value is a set of 0DS objects. It is worth to note here that, the value of the property 'content' in
class 7H[W can be either the text itself or the name of the file containing the text. The value of the
'content' property in the $XGLR and ,PDJH classes (the latter is not shown in this graph), is always a
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3 Information Retrieval in the HTGuide User Interface
The HTGuide interface assumes the form of a country map with submaps. The user may navigate
through the hierarchy of maps by traversing the links which connect related information pieces. The
possible ways of exploring information are described below. Whatever way is used, the tourist has the
impression of visiting the areas of interest and thus performing a simulation of the actual excursion on
the computer. The travel agent may use this effect to suggest one or more alternative trips, which can
be defined as described in the next section.
3.1 Traversal of the Aggregation Hierarchy
The exploration of information maintained in HTGuide is performed by traversing the aggregation
graphs, which connect each geographical object to its components, as shown in Fig. 1. A user session

starts with a country map containing the districts it consists of. The districts on the map are hotspots,
i.e. areas of the display where mouse events are captured. The event recognised by a hotspot on the
country map triggers the traversal of an aggregation path, emanating from the &RXQWU\ object and
pointing to the related 'LVWULFW component corresponding to the hotspot area. The result of this, is
the presentation of information for the selected district. The tourist may select an interesting region
within the district and an interesting site or town within the selected region, in a recursive way.
Towns and sites of interest also appear as hotspots on the maps of a region. At the site/town level of
the aggregation hierarchy, the tourist may obtain information like pictures, road maps of the town,
information about transportation, accommodation, etc. by activating the attached hotspots and buttons.
The traversal of the aggregation hierarchy is intended as an aid to a tourist who has no or very little
knowledge on the country of interest and wishes to explore the maintained information, obtaining
gradually more detailed data, before deciding on the specific areas to be visited. The HTGuide
interface allows the traversal of the aggregation hierarchy in two ways; namely, (i) in the reverse
direction of aggregation graphs so that the user may return to a higher-order composite and select
another component to study, and (ii) in breadth-first order, so that the sibling objects at each level are
visited, before an in-depth study of the components of a geographical object takes place.
3.2 Free Navigation in the Hypernetwork and Direct Access to the Nodes
The method of traversing the aggregation hierarchy is not appropriate if the tourist is interested in
visiting specific places of the country of interest. The HTGuide interface provides an alternative
method which allows a user to freely navigate through the hypernetwork. This free navigation is
facilitated in two ways, namely by direct accessing nodes using the naming mechanism of the HTGuide
model and by providing visual representation of links in the form of hotspots.
In this way, the tourist may provide the name of the area of interest and retrieve all objects under the
same name. These objects may be presented to the tourist in many forms like pictures, maps, text,
animation, sound, music etc. Furthermore, if the textual information on an object contains explicit
references to other objects, the tourist may freely navigate these links and retrieve all related
information. For instance, if the historical description of a site contains references to other towns - not
necessarily in the same region - which have sightseeings of the same period of time, with these
references defined as hotspots, the user may traverse these links by activating the hotspots and retrieve
the information related to the referenced towns.
3.3 Construction of Paths
HTGuide provides the possibility of 'virtual' trips according to the routes created by the users, during
their navigation over the hypernetwork. In order to assist the tourist in constructing the route of a
desired trip during navigation, HTGuide offers a path marking mechanism: when a user visits a node
describing a place (district, region, town or other site) which may be visited during the actual trip, this
node is marked for reconsideration.

The HTGuide interface 'remembers' these nodes and attaches them to a list of nodes marked so far. If
a node is visited more than once, only the most recent visit is recorded. This mechanism is available to
the user, who wishes to trace back his/her exploration of the hypermedia network. The path of visited
nodes can be recollected later on, to serve as the initial plan of the journey. This plan can be further
filtered and a human agent may help in fixing details on its materialisation.
Further developments are considering more sophisticated methods for the path marking mechanism,
as the one proposed in [8].
4 Customisation facilities
Since there is no model that can satisfactorily cover all needs for an application, the possibility of
customisations performed during the lifetime of the application must be incorporated in the model. The
HTGuide model allows a number of modifications in the tourist database to be performed by nonexpert users. The user who will perform the modifications is expected to be typically the travel agent.
The updates on HTGuide fall into two categories. The first one concerns customisations of the
interface, by creating hotspots and suggesting paths over the hypermedia network, corresponding to
suggested tours. The second one concerns modifications of the database, both in terms of regular
updates in order to add new hotels and restaurants, to modify prices or other characteristics etc., and in
terms of adding, modifying and deleting geographical objects.
More specifically, hotspots are certain areas on the screen that can capture mouse events and trigger
actions by traversing predefined links. HTGuide provides the facility to the user to automatically
generate such hotspots as well as the corresponding links. In this way, the user may relate already
existing objects and customise the interface according to his/her interests and according to his /her
way of viewing things.
The path construction mechanism, described in subsection 3.3, is used both by the tourists for the
creation of their personalised tours and by the travel agents in order to prepare suggested tours for their
clients. HTGuide lets travel agents create a portfolio of solutions to be produced for different
categories of tourist groups according to their specific interests.
Fig. 4 depicts an animated map of a suggested tour. The interface is written in Greek, as the
developed prototype was tested by Greek tourists. The edges of the path are being constructed
dynamically, during an audible short description of the places suggested to be visited. At the bottom of
the right side, there appears a list of keywords on the type of places that may be visited. It can be seen
that in this figure, two keywords have been clicked on, namely Archaeological sites ($
) and Continental Greece (+ (). The suggested tour has been
constructed according to this selection.
The second category of updates, i.e. the modifications on the HTGuide database, refers to the
updating of information of the facilities attached to already existing geographical objects, as well as to

the creation of new geographical objects or their deletion. The former case corresponds to conventional
database operations, e.g. when a new pub has opened in a town, it must be added to the value of the
{entertainment} property of the town object. In the latter case, the geographical objects must be
processed according to the principles of composite object manipulation, as they belong to an
aggregation hierarchy. Thus, the creation of a geographical object requires that the higher order
composite, to which it belongs, already exists.

Fig. 4. A suggested tour on archaeological sites on the continental part of Greece

As regards the deletion of a geographical (composite) object, other than a Country object, it does not
take place as in most conventional applications, i.e. it does not imply the elimination of all its
components. Rather, when a geographical object O is deleted, its components become directly attached
to the composite, to which O initially belonged. In terms of the aggregation hierarchy of Fig. 1, this
policy means that the deletion of an object belonging to a non-leaf class implies the elimination of the
object's name: the object cannot be accessed by the HTGuide retrieval mechanisms, but it still serves
as a dummy container of its components. However, the deletion of a &RXQWU\ object results in the
elimination of all its components.
5 A Prototype Implementation of HTGuide
A prototype of the proposed HTGuide model has been implemented on a Macintosh platform using
MacroMind DirectorTM for the construction of the animation sequences and for audio-visual
synchronisation. The object-oriented data model, the interface, the naming mechanism and the
automatic linking facility have been developed using the HyperTalk language. No knowledge of
HyperTalk is required to perform the activities described in the previous sections. The multimedia data
intended for usage in HTGuide must be generated externally to HyperCardTM in a format supported
by HyperCard. The prototype is a tourist guide for Greece, and is operational under HyperCard.

In the current implementation, author-defined hotspots are supported both for textual items and for
images, but the end-user may define only textual hotspots.
Properties ranging over the subhierarchy rooted at the class )DFLOLW\ are implemented as
components, i.e. objects of this subhierarchy of classes only exist within the geographical objects they
belong to. This approach facilitates local updates over global ones, since the tourist agency is expected
to modify individual facilities attached to a given geographical object, rather than update the same
property of all objects appearing as facilities to any geographical objects in a global way.

Fig. 4. A suggested tour on archaeological sites on the continental part of Greece

Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 depict the cards presented to the HTGuide user for the region and town objects. Fig.
5 shows the region of Chania in the island Crete and Fig. 6 shows all the facilities provided by the city
of Chania.
The buttons at the bottom of the card in Fig. 5, serve for the activation of the HTGuide direct access
mechanism, for the traversal of the aggregation hierarchy towards sibling and towards higher level
nodes, for the usage of the history and for the activation of the on-line Help. The small map at the
upper left-hand corner serves for accessing other geographical nodes at the same level of the
aggregation hierarchy. Finally, on the central map in Fig. 5, each textual item is a hotspot for direct
access to the geographical object with the same name. On Fig. 6, the button for the display of the
{food} property is activated, presenting a menu of selections of the subclasses of the class
5HVWDXUDQW to which the objects of this set belong. The user is prompted to select objects of a
subclass, whereupon the list of the restaurants in this subclass will be presented.

Fig. 5. Region object for the Chania region in Crete

Fig. 6. Facilities provided by the Town object for the city of Chania
6 Conclusions and Future Work
The development of tourist multimedia systems has become lately very active and a number of systems
offering guidance to tourists have started to appear [9, 14, 16]. Along these lines, this paper presented a
Hypermedia Tourist Guide system, called HTGuide.
The main advantages of HTGuide are its user-friendliness, its interactivity, its openness and
extendibility and its provision of a model suitable for the design of multimedia tourist applications.
HTGuide also proposes two classifications of information at the higher level of design (tourist

attractions and facilities), which help in the automatic creation of links and in the maintenance of the
database schema.
The requirements for developing the HTGuide prototype have been collected by interviewing its
potential users (i.e. travel agents and tourists). The prototype has been tested by a large number of
Greek tourists (hence, its Greek language interface) in large tourist agencies in Athens and it has been
updated according to the obtained results. Further development of the prototype will include a multilingual interface.
Currently we are working towards the development of a conceptual language for the formal
expression of the concepts and the relationships between the conceptual entities defined in the schema.
This language will model clearly real-world objects belonging in the tourist domain. The same model
will also be used in checking integrity and completeness constraints during the instantiation of new
tourist applications.
Future work involves the incorporation of HTGuide in the communication infrastructure of the
constraint-based tourist guidance system MaTourA [9]. HTGuide will then be used to automatically
generate user interface agents. Following this approach, it will then be possible to use real-world data,
stored in large distributed tourist data bases, as they are becoming accessible by the information
retrieval agent of MaTourA.

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