Harford County Tour Recommendation

Abstract

Visit Harford — Harford County, Maryland’s destination marketing organization — would like to improve its Visitor Tour Planning Application to enhance the touring experience for people visiting the county. The current application shows each point of interest individually and lacks an integrated way to show visitor’s a tour of all the points of interest (museums, breweries, and monuments). As a result, visitors have to find and map every point of interest one by one. To improve this experience, this project aims to attract tourists to the county and make them aware of the various activities happening in the county. The county envisions a web and mobile-based user application that will provide visitors with tour recommendations based on sites’ locations and business hours, and the visitor’s time preference. This tool will benefit visitors by providing intelligent tour recommendations for visiting points of interest based on location, time preferences, and selected categories (landmark, art, sports, lodging, etc.). The visitors will have the freedom to seamlessly plan personalized tours based on the categories they select and without switching back and forth between details of each point of interest. To achieve this, data from GIS class—points of interest (POI), address, category (landmark, art, sports, lodging, etc.), contact, business hours, descriptions, and geocoding details (mainly longitude and latitude information)—of the various attractions will be made available to the app development team, which will then use it to map tours using either Google Maps or other openly available mapping application programming interfaces (APIs).