Open Tourist Information System: a platform for touristic information management and outreach

In this paper, we present a generic, open source, touristic information system. The main objective of this platform is to promote the development of third-party applications based on a previously structured data and validated centralized common source of open information. The proposed system comprises an information management module and an extended set of web services enabling efficient information management as well as its use by third-parties such as web and mobile applications. It was designed with a modular functional architecture with the aim of being easy to implement and adapt in practical environments, as well as being user-friendly and having capability to grow. The entire system structure is discussed in detail. We test the use of the information system in a practical scenario, implementing it for the Douro World Heritage Region, Portugal. The web services developed are profiled in this real word setting through a wide set of performance tests. The results show that the end-to-end execution times of the web services functions make them suitable for standard tourism applications. These results establish concrete performance benchmarks for future applications.