A Modular Approach to Support GIS Functionality in Tourism Applications S. Christodoulakis, M. Anastasiadis, T. Margazas, N. Moumoutzis, P. Kontogiannis, G. Terezakis, C. Tsinaraki Laboratory of Distributed Multimedia Information Systems & Applications – Technical University of Crete (MUSIC/TUC) Technical University of Crete, Chania, GREECE e-mail: {stavros, manos, tm, nektar, pkonto, gterez, chrisa}@ced.tuc.gr phone: +30-821-64803, fax: +30-821-64846 Abstract Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a rapidly expanding field enabling the development of applications that manage and use geographic information in combination with other media. This technology, offers great opportunities for the development of modern tourism applications using maps to present information to the users in a natural and effective way. One approach to provide GIS functionality to applications is to exploit the facilities offered by modern operating systems for interoperability. This paper presents such an effort to build tools incorporating MS Windows OLE technology to provide GIS functionality to applications developed for the MS Windows platform. The first tool is Map Studio, a GIS editor used to prepare maps. The second is Map Control, an ActiveX control which can be used by an application in order to present and browse the maps created with Map Studio integrating them with other media or data coming from relational databases. 1. Introduction Maps are a natural means of indexing and presenting tourism related information. Travelers are using maps to navigate during their travels and for preparing their routes. Moreover, maps exploit the two dimensional capabilities of human vision and present the information in a compact and easy to read way. Today, due to advances in modern telecommunication and information technologies, there is an increasing effort in the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Among the application fields that exploit these advances in order to provide powerful services is tourism [6][7][8], culture and education. However, most GIS, that have been developed up to now are operating in workstations and mainframes. Only a small number of GIS is operating in the most popular platform, PC/Windows. Moreover, these few GIS are far more complicated and sophisticated than a usual tourism application developer could handle and exploit. In order to overcome these obstacles and provide an easy to use GIS tool appropriate for tourism application development, Map Studio and (ActiveX) Map Control were designed and developed. In this paper, we'll present R&D activities that took place in MUSIC that lead us to the creation of an easily adaptable Integrated Environment for the development of efficient applications with need for Geographic functionality.