Automatic Generation of Multimedia Tour Guide from Local Blogs

It has recently become a common practice for people to post their sightseeing experiences on weblogs (blogs). Their blog entries often contain valuable information for potential tourists, who can learn about various aspects not found on the official websites of sightseeing spots. Bloggers provide images, videos and texts regarding the places they visited. This implies that popular travel routes could be extracted according to the information available in blogs. In this paper, we describe a system that extracts typical visitor's travel routes based on blog entries and that presents multimedia content relevant to those routes. Typical travel routes are extracted by using a sequential pattern mining method. We also introduce a new user interface for presenting multimedia content along the route in a proactive manner. The system works as an automatically generated tour guide accessible from a PC or a mobile device.