International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 7(4) 2020, Pages: 113-120
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International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences
Journal homepage: http://www.science-gate.com/IJAAS.html
113
Smart tourism and location-based services architectural model
Ahmad H. Al-Omari
1,
*, Bassam A. Y. Alqaralleh
1, 2
1
Computer Science Division Department, Faculty of Science, Northern Border University, Saudi Arabia
2
Computer Science Department, Faculty of Information Technology, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University (AHU), Ma'an, Jordan
ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT
Article history:
Received 5 November 2019
Received in revised form
28 January 2020
Accepted 28 January 2020
A one-stop-service for the tourism sector is proposed in this work. To build
and develop smart tourism services you need many key tourism
stakeholders' participation and integration which is not an easy effort; in this
work, we proposed some important tourism basic services like Location-
Based services, Location-Aware services, Tourism Information, smart
tourism guide, navigation, localization, emergency notifications, and tourist
experience. The researchers used the Component-Based-Architecture (CBA)
approach that was integrated with a layered service approach to build the
smart tourism model. This architecture allows for easy system expansion and
adoption.
Keywords:
Smart tourism
Smart systems
Location-based services
© 2020 The Authors. Published by IASE. This is an open access article under the CC
BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
1. Introduction
*Mathematics The fast growth and rapid
development in the fields of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT), along with the
evolving mobile technologies, has encouraged the
development of smart applications in different areas
(Antikainen et al., 2006). Most of the current mobile
applications have location-aware and location-based
capabilities, which become an essential part of our
daily life activities (Jinendra et al., 2012). The recent
developments in mobile-based services encouraged
the public and private sectors to employ this
technology to improve services, enhance
profitability, reduce cost, and increase customer
penetration to information. Usually, people face
difficulties when exploring places. They have to ask
someone or get help from paper maps, which are
usually printed on brochures or leaflets. A smart
tourism system that is equipped with location-based
services (LBS) is an excellent solution to overcome
these difficulties. The technology development led to
the appearance of smart systems services, which
minimize the human intervention in demand
response to interaction with the systems and the
applications (Puja-Rani, 2015). Smart systems
integrate technologies and services through
networking for easy life practices (Robles and Kim,
* Corresponding Author.
Email Address: ahmed.alomari@nbu.edu.sa (A. H. Al-Omari)
https://doi.org/10.21833/ijaas.2020.04.015
Corresponding author's ORCID profile:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7851-6582
2313-626X/© 2020 The Authors. Published by IASE.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
2010). Also, smart systems have the potential to
make many achievements in the tourism sector,
particularly in promoting travel planning, suggesting
traffic conditions, navigation messages, environment
queries, finding the nearest restaurants, finding
hotels, tourist guides, and many others (Gretzel et al.,
2015).
Travel and tourism sector in 2017 has the power
for wealth and employment creation in the global
economy; it contributes about 3.8% of the Global
Domestic Product (GDP) growth. In total, the Travel
and Tourism sector in 2016 generated about US$7.6
trillion (10.2% of global GDP) and 292 million jobs
worldwide. The sector accounted for 6.6% of total
global exports and almost 30% of total global service
exports (WTTC, 2017), and served more than 700
million tourists each year (Jinendra et al., 2012).
Smart tourism differs from e-tourism in the sense
of using smartphones-based applications to provide
tourism services. Different tourism and tourism-
related services get benefits from the technological
revolution in ICT, Internet of Things (IoT), Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID), Quick Response
(QR) code, and Near Field Communication (NFC),
Global Positioning System (GPS) and Location-Based
Services (LBS) which are commonly abbreviated as
"app" (Al-Omari and Al-Marghirani, 2017).
Nowadays, tourism sector adapts the fast-
changing technology environment (Gajdošík, 2018);
it is a rich environment for mobile application
services, where smart tourism can be offered to
provide the traveler with the necessary information
before, during, and after the travel. As the amount of
information and smart services increases, it becomes
difficult for travelers to manage and find the right
information at the right time (Ricci, 2010).