Tourism information system of South West Khasi Hills District, Meghalaya, India

Abstract

Rich in its natural beauty, culture and tradition is South West Khasi hills, a district in Meghalaya which is having a great potential. An initiative was made to identify and collect valuable information of the various tourist spots situated in Mawkyrwat and Ranikor Community Rural Development Blocks of South West Khasi Hills Districts, Meghalaya. Using GIS platform and web based applications namely-Geoserver and Map Server for Windows (open source) Tourism Information System of South West Khasi Hills District was prepared. In this paper, demonstration was made on the identification of new tourist spots in South West Khasi Hills District including connectivity by different types of roads along with route and direction from source to destination analysed and fly-through were created over these networks. Web based applications were developed to reach out the different user groups, that is, service provider and end –users providing them with visual description of the location, photographs of the sites, proper route channels to reach the destination with shortest distance navigation offline and online. The web application is user friendly for future collaboration with numerous possible department information updates. The nature of work is unique and one of its kind done for the area as these tourist spots were recently identified. The outputs from the study will be useful for identifying potential services to develop tourism in the area.