A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2005

Emerging technologies are changing the way GIS is being used - from Desktop to Mobile GIS. The recent technological advancements in wireless communications. handheld devices and GPS have made Mobile GIS a reality. Mobile GIS is the use of geographic data in the field on mobile devices. The main users of Mobile GIS are field workers and consumers of Location Based Services (LBS). The applications of Mobile GIS can be enormous and one of them is Tourism. Tourism is information intensive and sensitive industry in which Mobile GIS is expected to play an important role. Tourists need well-organized information on their fingertips, anywhere and anytime, to orient themselves in a place that is entirely new for them. Paper maps, which are usually provided, have many limitations such as limited amount of details, difficulty in locating one's own position on the map or difficulty in searching for a place of interest. The tourism market, in Thailand, is very successful and is one of the important markets that make the high value income. A Mobile GIS based Tourist Information System called e-Assistant has been developed for potential tourism areas covering three sub-districts (Tambons) of Krabi province of Thailand. Krabi is located about 800 km south of the Thai capital, Bangkok, on the Andaman Sea coast between 7'30" and 830" north latitude, and 9830" and 99'30" east longitude. The target audiences are the tourists having Internet enabled PDAs. The required base & thematic Maps are created from the existing data in the form of ESRI's shape file format and the data collected from GPS field survey. The system is developed, taking advantage of wireless technology and using Open Source Software such as GNU/Linux, PostgreSQL / PostGIS, Minnesota Mapserver, PHI, .Apache HTTP server, HTML and Java Script. The system not only provides useful information but tourists could locate themselves on the map and privileged users are allowed to upload data to the server from field. Though the system developed has some limitations such as it provides information only about point features, only point data can he uploaded to the server, the system accessibility is dependent on the network connectivity etc. but more than 83 % of the users who have evaluated the system think that this can be an excellent tool to support tourism. In the evaluation test the anticipated weighted average for the system to be acceptable is 4 out of 7. The overall weighted average for the system acceptance was found to be 5.1, which shows the acceptance of the system by the users