The steady decline of natural resource-based industries has posed some significant challenges to the sustainability of rural America. Many rural communities have turned to tourism as a solution for their economic revitalization. The Internet offers an ideal tool for the promotion of tourism. However, its full potential has yet to be realized by rural tourism communities. The goal of the Phase 1 R&D effort is to develop a proof-of-concept prototype which will demonstrate the technical merit and feasibility of the proposed Virtual Tourism Office software. OBJECTIVES: The steady decline of natural resource-based industries has posed some significant challenges to the sustainability of rural America. Many rural communities have turned to tourism as a solution for their economic revitalization. The Internet offers an ideal tool for the promotion of tourism. However, its full potential has yet to be realized by rural tourism communities. Most tourism promotion websites of rural communities are nothing more than a directory of hyperlinks to other scattered websites. As a result, not only is a potential tourist burdened with having to go through more than one website to plan his/her trip to a rural destination, but many valuable cross-marketing opportunities are also lost in this web of incongruent Internet sites. TranXecutes Virtual Tourism Office will address the limitations of current Web-based tourism promotion technologies by incorporating a layer of artificial intelligence which can astutely cross-market products and services listed on different websites. Moreover, using multiple user-specified criteria, this layer of artificial intelligence will also be able to simultaneously execute different tasks to generate a customized travel itinerary in one single step, thereby eliminating the need for potential tourists to visit a series of websites just to plan for their trips. APPROACH: All of this will be accomplished by employing a hub and spokes layout, with an intelligent central website supported by a back-end Relational Database Management System acting as the hub, and numerous individual websites belonging to rural businesses catering to tourists acting as the spokes
