Design and implementation of an automatic tourist guide

Over the last years, smartphones have evolved to an important computing platform. Cities therefore offer mobile applications to provide visitors with guidance and support to boost the tourism industry. There are a lot of available tourist applications for Vienna, but they tend to focus on accommodation, navigation, social services or marketing instead of providing information for sightseeing. This master thesis focuses on the sightseeing aspect for tourists and presents an application for the Android platform which offers location-based information on sights in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The content is automatically gathered fromWikipedia by a backend web application which provides an interface for the front-end to obtain the data with an update. This enables an offline usage of the Android application to avoid roaming charges. The main feature of the Automatic Tourist Guide (ATG) is the automatic guide which makes it possible for the user to walk through the city enjoying the view while the application delivers the relevant information via text-to-speech whenever a point of interest (POI) is passed. This is achieved by determining the exact location of the user and then computing the nearby POIs using a distance calculation algorithm. Furthermore, the ATG provides a map with all available sights and the route to the nearest attraction. The user is also able to choose categories in which he is interested in and will be presented only with content regarding his preferred subjects. In addition, there are three different versions of the content available: the unabridged text, a summarization of the most valuable information and a brief overview with only one paragraph.