Innovative e-Tourism Services on top of Geo2Tag LBS Platform

Location based and geo-context aware services form the new fast growing domain of commercially successful ICT solutions. These services play the key role in IoT scenarios and development of smart spaces and proactive solutions. One of the most attractive application areas is e-Tourism. More people can afford travelling and over the last few decades we see continues growth of the tourist activity. At the same time we see huge increase of demand both in quantity and quality of tourist services. Many experts foresee that this growth cannot any longer be fulfilled by applying traditional approaches. Similarly to the change in tickets and hotel booking, it is expected that soon we will witness major transformation in the whole industry towards e-Tourism driven market, where roles of traditional service providers, e.g., tourist agents, guides, will disappear or seriously changed. Internet of Things (IoT) is an integral part of the Future Internet ecosystem that has major impact on development of e-Tourism services. IoT provides an infrastructure to uniquely identify and link physical objects with virtual representations. As a result any physical object can have virtual reflection in the service space. This gives an opportunity to replace actions on physical objects by operations on their virtual reflections, which is faster, cheaper and more comfortable for the user. In this paper we summarize our research in the field, share ideas of innovative e-Tourism services and present Geo2Tag LBS platform that allows easy and fast development of such services.