Travel guide system: social network for travellers

Abstract

Among numerous social networks and applications on the web environment, there is hardly a tool that allows travellers to communicate based on a content related to their trips and destinations. There’s also a difficulty finding social and cultural events around a visited destination. This work proposes a web platform that aims to provide a communication channel between travellers, independently of their location, through segmented and location based content through various functionalities. The platform allows users to plan, create and publish trips with one or more destinations. In addition, it allows to post questions and comments that are location based. On the other side of the platform, users are able to find cultural and travel related events based on location. They are able to locate other travellers and trips planned by other users and communicate with them through messages. Furthermore, users are able to read and comment on posts and questions created by other users. In addition to the location based content, the interface of the platform provides a map, where users can visualise the location of the mentioned items and trip routes on an interactive map. In order to achieve these functionalities, integrations were implemented with external APIs, of which Google Maps, Meetup, Facebook APIs are the most important. Other technologies used for developing the platform are the web-application framework Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and relational databases.