TOURINP is a Tourism Information Point, a system offering the user a simple way to search and visualize tourist information (hotels, monuments, shops, etc). The access to the data and the display of information is established via a system combining geographical information and multimedia information in an attractive way.. Travel-related business is the market for TOURINP: chain of hotels, travel agencies, tourist bureau, car rental and finally, the home market. TOURINP allows connection to information servers and global distribution systems through integrated services digital networks (ISDN). Furthermore, TOURINP offers the common advantages provided by multimedia points of information such as video, still image, text in hypertext mark-up language (HTML) format and audio combined in one view. Hypermedia links and an intuitive user interface allows the user to query databases wherever they are.
TOURINP works in a client/server architecture based on Microsoft Windows NT and it has been completely developed in Microsoft Visual C++ (object oriented programming). Different databases can be accessed; it has an user interface, a local server and two resource interface modules (RIM), a structured query language (SQL) RIM and a file RIM. Databases with tourist information are located in the server. The system is composed of three software modules, each of them being developed in a different programming environment: geographic interface, developed in Avenue (ArcView and acutes object oriented language) and Visual C++ 1.5 (16 bits); multimedia interface: developed in Visual C++ 2.0 (32 bits); communications subsystem developed in Watcom C++. The user perceives the interfaces as being just one, due to the existing connection among them; this connection is implemented through Windows dynamic data exchange (DDE) user interface. The user interface consists of a selector, a browser and several presenters.