Ashish Deshpande
Ruban Monu
Subhav Mital
Swapnil Shinde
Imagine wandering aimlessly in an unacquainted foreign location such as Rome and not knowing where to proceed. Wouldn’t you wish to have a helping hand at such a distressful situation? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have someone advise you instantly and guide your path towards your destination or then offer you invaluable and unbiased suggestions about possible places to tour? Our application attempts to enforce all these features and serves as a platform which makes travelling an enjoyable experience!
Today’s commercially motivated Travel Agents offer biased suggestions which would reap profits to their business. This has caused many economic conscious individuals to steer clear from such agents thereby causing the need for an application which helps assist the user in planning his travel itinerary effectively.
We plan to have a coherent system with multiple services integrated under a single platform having the following features.
1) Weather Conditions - Current Weather Conditions of the places to visit. This is significant as it may alter one’s decision according to the current weather conditions and avoid disappointment later ( Eg : Waterfall in drought? or Not enough clothing to sustain extreme cold temperatures)
2) Optimal Path to Take – Given a set of locations, it would be wise to visit Place A when compared to Place B, taking into consideration the distances between different locations. (Shortest
Optimal Path)
3) Approximate Budget - An approximate estimate of the cost of services/amount would help one to plan better and prevent surprises later.
4) IM/Blogs – Get the client in touch with people who have already visited a particular place either through an IM-session or some related blogs with pictures and comments.

As far as we our knowledge is concerned, there is no one single application which has all of our proposed features under a single umbrella. Although there are travel blogs and web-sites which can get people in touch with travel-agents, people are still required to explore a lot before they can finalize their dream trip. In order to preclude the user from spending more time on searching where to go than actually enjoying their holidays, it is necessary to have a single comprehensive application which can take care of all the searching and recommending.
Moreover, this is also important to save the users from falling prey to biased suggestions from travel-agents.
Web-sites like expedia.com and Travelocity.com are generally useful once the user decides on places to visit. Something that can help users make a decision on where to go is generally not available except for asking relatives and friends which may not necessarily be globe-trotters.
We propose to accept user’s input about a desired location and provide the user a real time travel assistant which helps optimize the operations.
Weather
Info. Handler
IM/Blogs
Component
Miscellaneous
Info. Extractor
Client
Client
Client
Travel
Recommendation engine
User and location information
Location generating component
Cost Info.
Evaluator

1) Resources
We primarily utilize Google API’s to accomplish our goal. This includes Google Maps API’s for location based services; Google Earth API’s to determine miscellaneous useful information like weather conditions and probably an aerial view of the location; an Algorithm which determines the optimal path to be chosen and a budget calculator which helps establish the approximate amount of money that the user must spend.
H/W resources required
Two Desktops/ Laptops with > 1GB RAM (one for our service and one for the database)
Some Desktops/ Laptops for testing our service by accessing it remotely
Processor speed – 2.0 GHz or above
S/W resources required
JDK 1.5 or higher
Netbeans IDE 6 or higher
Apache Tomcat/ Glassfish
Ajax plugin support
APIs as required

2) Schedule
Sr.No
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 6
Week 7
Date
Feb 9-15
Feb 16- Feb 22
Feb 23- Mar 1
Mar 2- Mar 8
Mar 9- Mar 15
Mar 16- Mar 22
Mar 23- Mar 29
Apr 30- Apr 5
Apr 6- Apr 12
Week 8
Week 9
Apr 13- Apr 19
Apr 21
Task
Reading up and Gathering Resources
Reading up API’s and Technical Details
Installing Required Software, Begin Coding
Implementing Feature 1: Google API with Locations
Implementing Feature 2: Google Earth (Weather Conditions)
Implementing Feature 3: Instant Messaging
Implementing Feature 3: Miscellaneous
Integrating all System parts, Misc additions
Evaluation and Testing the entire System
Results Evaluation and Project Report Work
Final Project Demo

Quality Assurance is essential to ensure that the software performs as per its intended purpose.
We carry out extensive on the system by emulating different use cases to see if the system performs as desired.
We also put erroneous data to evaluate its performance and check whether the system does not react unconventionally.
We test the Google API along with all its features like weather conditions, path recommendations, and budget analysis and evaluate our software for its effectiveness.
Any error should be modified and corrected to ensure a final, robust and efficient system.
Deliverables
Deliverables include the following:
1.
In-class demonstration
2.
Source code of the described project
3.
Final Report
4.
Scope for improvement
1) http://code.google.com/apis/maps/
2) http://code.google.com/apis/earth/
3) http://www.expedia.com/
4) http://www.codeplex.com/awAPI
5) http://magictravels.blogspot.com
6) Online JAVA and AJAX tutorials