Gazetteer for Scotland: Automated Tourist / Local History Guides

With the growing tourism industry and the impact of the existing COVID-19 pandemic, tourists are increasingly demanding tourist guides that cover not only basic geographical information about a destination, but also provide a sufficient wealth of information about the history and culture of that place. Based on the regularly updated Gazetteer for Scotland database, this research aims to optimise and solve the problems of past versions of automatically generated tourist guides, and to add a historical perspective section and a historical map section by combining python and LaTex technologies. The feedback from previous students, personal observation and analysis, and comments from Professor Gittings were used as basic requirements for optimising past versions, and the layout, colour scheme and map details of guidebooks were continuously refined in accordance with this requirement. To ensure the appropriate length of text, the text in the Historical Perspective section is split in numerous sentences and looped through the program sentence by sentence to find the contents after 1880s. The historical maps from the National Library of Scotland are automatically acquired using the selenium package in python based on the coordinates and the sequence number of the selected town. Those historical maps determine the scale, historical version and number of maps output based on the size of the town. The results indicate that the user experience survey has significantly improved the reading experience of tourist guides compared to previous versions. Also, the addition of the Historical Perspectives and Historical Maps sections has greatly improved the professionalism and richness of guides' content, which helps the product to be closer to the user's needs to better attract more users