Digitised journeys for holiday makers

Holiday makers now have access to a website that tracks various popular tourist routes along the West Coast, the Northern, Eastern and Western Cape and Kwazulu-Natal. Visitors to the Times Explorer site can follow the Explorer reporting teams around South Africa in an exploration of the best restaurants, bars, clubs and wayside attractions along selected routes.

Digital mapping company, MapIT has entered into a broad long term agreement to supply digital mapping data to media giant group, Avusa.

The Times Explorer project website (http://explorer.timeslive.co.za) is one of the first to implement the web mapping technology supplied by MapIT to build an interactive web mapping page.

The live, 10-week interactive Explorer Project, tracks various popular tourist routes – South Africa’s ‚greatest journeys’ – along the West Coast, the Northern, Eastern and Western Cape and Kwazulu-Natal.

Visitors to the site can follow the Explorer reporting teams around South Africa in an exploration of the best restaurants, bars, clubs and wayside attractions along selected routes. Touring a different area each week, reporters post photographs, reports and assessments of establishments onto the website designed to attract participation and comment from users.

The Explorer site is one of several Avusa ventures that make bold use of digital mapping with enriched point-of-interest data.

‚The Explorer project is an imaginative demonstration of what geo-location and enriched data can add to accurate mapping on a website.‚ says Etienne Louw, Managing Director of MapIT.

Options include viewing the map as a graphic map display, a hybrid view (a satellite view overlaid with towns and key roads), or an unmarked satellite photograph of the terrain.

Visitors to the site can, by clicking on a map-located icon, track the real time location of the reporting team. Hyperlinks tie articles, photographs and comments to the actual point-of-interest location of a restaurant or a roadside attraction on a detailed map of South Africa. A click on a relevant icon will display contact details, addresses and trading information for specific attractions.