e-Silkroad: A sample of combining social media with cultural tourism

With the development of Web2.0, very large scale resources of multimedia have emerged in the internet. In this paper, we present a novel framework of building a tour guide based on the online knowledge resources, e.g., e-Silkroad, a photographic guide of traditional Silkroad. The tour guide is jointly established by text information from Wikipedia and images from flickr website. Our method starts from a keyword "silkroad" in Wiki and typical cities are extracted and regarded as the key threads of the guide. Then a great number of images and their description tags are downloaded from Flickr website. To highlight the most interesting place and more active tourist, the framework computes the hot spots and photographers in the dataset. To introduce each place along the silkroad, all the images are classified into four categories by its content, including person, food, man-made, and sights. Finally, the images are registered into Google Maps according to the geog-tag descriptions along silk routes to generate e-Silkroad. In our evaluation experiment, 20676 images were downloaded from 35 key cities along silkroad. Experimental results show that it is effective from social media to cultural tourism under the connected environment.