CIS 8020 Assignment 2 UT Olympic Guide Google Map

With the Olympics coming to Rio De Janerio in 2016 MO Tourist Attractions (imaginary company) wants to be able to provide tourists the ability to obtain quick and accurate information on the excellent places to dine, best to shop and locations of all the events. A graphical interface would provide the tourist a much better opportunity to visually get an idea of these ‘hot spots’ than just reading some text-based article or brochure. With leveraging the simple API as below the users will have the option of selecting if they want to see only places to shop (represented by ‘S’), places to dine (represented by ‘D’) or place of Olympic events (represented by ‘E’).

Google Map API is an great candidate solution to address this issue. It will generate a static map that can be integrated to Mo Tourist Attractions website and allow the users to select the different options (dine, shopping, events) that they want to see. A prototype is below:



When compared to other solutions , this option would be quick to implement and doesn’t require a lot of work on the back end of the website. It can be published and modified as necessary by any one of the agents at the tourist office and does not require advanced knowledge of website design. The time that it takes to load the map is fairly quick and will be very low maintenance.

Additionally MO Tourist Attractions can look at expanding the Google MAP API by integrating the Google Calendar API. This will allow the mapping of times and specific olympic events to locations and also any special occassions that may be happening at the dining restaurants (i.e. Olympic Atheletes dining at certain restuarants).