Reported by: electronicnewsletter edition team, National Parks of Taiwan
Photos provided by:teamof National Parks of Taiwan

The smartphone era has brought many unexpectedconveniences to our life. Have you ever thought what the great benefits couldbe when technology and the national environment come together?

Initiate Self-servedService Anytime

In the recent years, the visitors to natural environments have increased. That also stimulates the demands and opportunities in the tourism industry. In alignment with the mobile technology application worldwide and the hot trend of the ICT industry in Taiwan, the Construction and Planning Agency completed the establishment of the Smart National Parks ICT Database Integration Platform and the National Parks Administration and Information Management Platform in 2013 and 2014.

In the short-term plan, the Taiwan National Parks Database Integration Platform was planned and developed at first to consolidate database and offers display functions according to the data characteristics, commonness and current status of the units from all national parks, which shows people the concept and spirit of Open Data. It has acquired approximately 30,000 data and completed the initial functions in data consolidation maintenance and searching.

Through the application of related systems, visitors can receive essential information anytime and anywhere to have better interactivity with park events.

Friendly Environment StartsFrom Friendly Technology

Have you ever had the experience of visiting a tourist site and not being able to squeeze to the front of a guided tour due to crowds, experienced the PDA guide running out of stock or even managed to get the PDA guide but was not reset to the default setting?

Throught the development of Open Data, this kind of situation will be improved gradually. For example, in terms of communication environment, Yangmingshan National Park has been in contact with telecommunication vendors to add stations in order to improve the signals in Qingtiangang, Erziping Trail, Datun and also increase the internet performance at visitor’s centers. In the setting of systems, to decrease the impact on the natural environment, 10 types of hand drawn icons are stuck on the description podiums at the important recreation sites and trails with the systematically designed podiums. Tourists can use their smart mobile devices to retrieve the QR code from the hand drawn icons in order to get the decriptive content for a specific podium related to its title. It offers people a more friendly and diverse method for self guiding recreational environments and improves the inconvenience and maintenance problems resulting from PDA guide rental.

Kenting National Park has also developed an innovated application of Smart Mobile Kenting. Examples include the technological trail at Eluanbi Park, biological species and Hengchun Ancient Castle mobile tour guide, and database services such as, biological species allocation map in Kenting, land usage distinction and address service in Kenting National Park, natural environment tour sites and mobile simulation.

Applying ICT smart technology has become a global trend. Through the application of related systems, people can receive essential information anytime at home or at the national parks to better understand the beauty of nature. For park management, we could also bring more effectiveness to tourism in guided tour, education and research through database added values, prevent redundancy in data maintenance and achieve the goal of applied services.

Yangmingshan National Park description podiumsinstallation (Provided by Yangmingshan National Park)	Hand drawn icons and QR Codes on descriptionpodiums (Provided by Yangmingshan National Park)