Is there some kind of community working on OSM for tourism? I’ve been dreaming for a while now to get national and local tourism agencies to contribute to OSM, but I don’t really now how to start. Also, I am to give a presentation about OSM to ecotourism students in a rural university in Bolivia, and I’d like to be able to give some examples.
Some general hint: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Presentations
In order to help, can you give us at least one example what your presentation is aiming at in detail?
What should travel agencies do concrete? And what is the task of the students?
I was thinking more about national tourism information agencies, not commercial ones. For example, iPeru does a tremendous job, I’m sure they could manage to map tourist attractions that are a bit more of the beaten track.
I’m not sure as to the program of the tourism students, though we’re talking about a rural university in Bolivia. So I think they might end up in small scale tourist attraction development (think building footbridges so you can get to a river), or maybe working in hotels.
Joost,
I don’t know if you have already seen this, but I am currently working on a completely new OSM Renderer based on ArcGIS, that puts strong emphasize on visualizing objects tagged as tourism attractions or historic. Have a look at this thread, it may be of interest to you, and certainly could be a nice example of what is already in the database for some countries (if you would like to use any of this as an example in your presentation, drop me a message here on the forums):
OSM Renderer for ArcGIS:
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=26451
I followed that thread closely, as I’m an ArcGIS user at work myself. For the presentation, it might be nice to see a few screenshots of what the Coroico, Bolivia area would look like on different zoom levels.