Matei DOMNIȚA
Centre of Mountain Economy “CE-MONT”, National Institute for Economic Research
“Costin C. Kirițescu”, Romanian Academy, Petreni, no. 49, 725700,Vatra Dornei, România.
E-mail: mdomnita@gmail.com
DOI: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10397405
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4808398
Abstract
In recent years, the popularity of hiking has grown constantly in different categories of the population. Although hiking offers benefits for physical and mental health, knowledge of the areas visited is essential to avoid certain risks. Clear information about mountain trails is necessary for any visitor. Due to technological developments and smartphones equipped with GPS, paper maps are slowly forgotten. In these maps there is no information about the current state of the routes or facilities in the area. The aim of this paper is to create and present an online interactive mapping application that allows the user’s spatial location with the GPS on the smartphone, display and navigate tourist routes and other points of interest such as accommodation, camping areas, springs or other objectives.
Through the OpenStreetMap database and the Mapbox library we can obtain, filter and display data as desired by the user on an interactive and dynamic map. The platform intends to promote outdoor physical activity and attract less experienced tourists to mountain areas. By creating a community that can communicate information about the status of trails, dangerous areas and other useful information immediately available to other users we want to facilitate the approach to these mountain areas.
In the future, the platform will allow integration with other platforms for booking accommodation, communication between hiking enthusiasts and organizing trips. In order to create the application, we extracted and processed data from OpenStreetMap for the entire Romanian territory, we compiled our own sets of data relevant for mountain tourism, which we made available in an application based on Vector Tiles Mapbox technology.
Keywords:
interactive map, online, Mapbox, Vector Tiles, OpenStreetMap, community, web application