Role of Geospatial Mashups in the Development of Rural Tourism: A Study from West Bengal, India

Rural tourism is the category of tourism that focuses on rural locations highlighting the rural art and culture, heritage and lifestyle, thereby helping the local community in economic and social development and cultural exchange. The rural tourism destinations have huge potential to turn into important tourist centres. But lack of detailed information about the locations like transportation, place of interest and on-spot available facilities is acting as barrier in this transition. The tourism industry has extensively adopted Web geographic information system (Web GIS) to provide improved service and information to the tourists. Geospatial Mashup is a field of collaborative and interactive Web applications that impeccably integrate datasets retrieved from diverse Web-based resources to create user-friendly and innovative Web GIS applications. This research paper highlights on the application of Geospatial Mashup in rural tourism promotion and development. The present study is conducted for a rural tourism site of West Bengal, India, to analyse the existing online information and the tourist inflow. It discusses the geo-referenced procedures of providing additional online information using Geospatial Mashups and its potential benefits. In the final segment of this paper, some suggested Mashup maps of the current research location are depicted that can be implemented for online promotion of the rural tourism site.