The World's Largest Travel Database (help me win a contest!)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Hi all! I’m working with a group of people on an online traveller’s resource, due to be launched in just over a week. We’re running an internal contest to beef up the content, and I’m extending a request to the 'Dope community to help me win. And it’s not just me; there could be something in it for you, too. There’s a lot of information here, so grab a beverage, and read on…

"What exactly is it?"

The new database, the NeoWorldGuide, is a resource similar to Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, and others. It provides users detailed information on various destinations, including restaurants, museums, tips for cities, and so on.

"Why is it so cool?"

Three reasons, primarily.

First, it’s huge. If you visit the Travel section of Discovery.com, you’ll see their content is provided by Lonely Planet. What they have is good; they’ve got profiles on a few hundred destinations worldwide. Our system, however, is set up to contain information on nearly a hundred thousand potential destination locations worldwide (from country down to neighborhood), with a virtually unlimited set of associated “objects” – restaurants, parks, airports, sports facilities, etc., etc. – for each location. When it’s done, it’ll dwarf every other resource currently available.

Second, it’s a database. All current travel guides are basically static: the editors made a list of destinations, wrote one or more pages for each, and then set up a menu to link to each page. Ours, on the other hand, is a true database, which means that if we want to add an “object” (bistro, hiking trail, concert hall, whatever), we just create the record in a table, link it to its location, and boom, it’s in. Also, once we put up the advanced search, you’ll be able to search for items matching specific criteria. For example, you could say, “Give me all Italian restaurants within two miles of my hotel that are non-smoking and wheelchair accessible.” No current resource can do this. And finally, because our travel guide is in database form, unlike the static-page competition, it’s entirely scalable, meaning it’s perfect for wireless and other applications.

Third, it’s totally interactive. Your favorite restaurant not listed? You can submit it, along with whatever descriptive comments you like. If your submission passes the database editor’s quality check, boom, it’s in the database for the world to see. Have a useful tip for a particular location? Say, you stayed at a hotel, and were woken up at 5 a.m. by the street cleaner rumbling past your window? You can add a comment to that hotel’s record, recommending that people request to be placed on the other side of the building. When the database editor approves it, boom, your comment is now associated with the hotel’s record. Nobody else does anything even close to this. And, you can even add photos!

"So what’s this contest?"

We’ve already got a ton of information in the database (although some is still in the integration pipeline and hasn’t showed up yet), but of course, with something like this, the more information we add, the better. This is particularly true because of the massive size of the database; although we may have a shell record for a tiny city like Drumheller in Canada (which of course you’ll never find on Fodor’s, Frommer’s, etc.), we don’t necessarily have any comments or objects associated with every single one of the nearly 100,000 locations.

To that end, my group has launched an internal contest, starting yesterday, Friday 9/22, and ending in just over a week, Monday 10/2. The top three team members with the most contributions will get really cool stuff, including a trip. The thing is, we’re submitting information via the NeoWorldGuide website interface, which means anybody anywhere in the world with an Internet connection can submit data. We’re allowed to recruit anyone we can to make contributions using our ID code, and we get credit for it. And of course, I thought, where else can I find such a great group of witty, well-informed, well-traveled people as on the SDMB?

"Okay, so what’s in it for me?"

At the moment, the contest is internal to our group; only team members can actually win. Anyone outside who contributes under a team member’s ID this week is doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. BUT, after we go live, we’re planning to institute some kind of recognition system for all contributors. The details still need to be worked out, but it’ll probably be something like what Amazon.com has on their site for book and product reviews. So please, please help me this week, and then you can keep going for yourself! Pretty cool, huh?

"Is it really that simple?"

Pretty much, yes, it is. There are, however, a couple of caveats, based on the fact that we’re still in pre-launch mode. First, certain aspects of the website aren’t finished yet. The front page is being completely rebuilt; it’ll have a map and other information, rather than the Yahoo-like drilldown menu that’s there now, which we put up as a temporary dummy interface. Some menus and bits of text need to be written or rewritten (there’s no “help” page yet, for example), and the advanced search box described above won’t be live until the last minute. Second, we’re still ironing out a few wrinkles; there are a couple of places where a city is duplicated, for example. We know we’ve got some bugs like that – you can disregard them. And third, because we’re pre-launch, we’re still piping tons of data into the database. If you look at the record for Rome, for example, you’ll find no destination guide, which may seem surprising. We’ve got it ready to go; it just isn’t live on the system as of today.

"Cool! So how do I contribute?"

Instructions are below, in the next message. (This is a really long post, so I split it up.)

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Important! If you haven’t read all of the message above, please go back and do so before continuing. Thanks!

Continued from above…

"How do I find and add information to the NeoWorldGuide?"

Start at the main interface page (see note above about the to-be-rebuilt front page). The address is:

http://www.neoworldguide.com/cgi-bin/main.cgi

To get where you’re going, you can either do a search using the simple search box at top (remember, Advanced Search isn’t up yet), or you can drill down using the menu links below. For example, if you want to add information to the record for Athens in Greece, you could enter “Athens” in the search box, and click GO. You’d see a list of matching records for every single Athens in the world, including the small city in the U.S. state Georgia; each listing will have the geographic path showing you which one is which. Click on the one for Greece, and there you are. Or, alternatively, to find Athens from the main page, you can click on Europe, then in the list of countries you click Greece, and so on down the line until you get to Athens.

The search above, for a “place,” is distinguished from a search for a “thing,” such as a hotel or a train station, by the drop-down selector between the search box and the GO button. To see if your “thing” is already in the system – say, your favorite cafe in Amsterdam – change the drop-down to “thing” and do the search the same way. Or, again, use the location menu to drill from Europe down to Amsterdam, and check the “Restaurants” link on the city page. Either way works.

If your “thing” – art museum, coffee shop, whatever – is already in the database, feel free to add a comment to it. If it isn’t there, you can add it.

Note: At the moment, the site has the capacity to add only things, not locations (cities, neighborhoods, etc.). You can comment on locations, but you can’t add them; you can add only things. So if you want to comment on, say a historical monument in Frozen Chickenscratch in the Yukon, but Frozen Chickenscratch isn’t listed as a city there, unfortunately, you’re out of luck. Sorry; that’ll be coming after we go live.

"How do I add a comment on a location?"

Simple. You can add a location comment at any level, from country down to neighborhood. If your comment is relevant to an entire country, such as coping with the fundamentalist Islamic shift in Malaysia, add the comment at the country level. If your comment is more city-specific, such as the best way to hail a cab in Kuala Lumpur, then add it at the city level. To view the profile for a country (instead of the list of provinces contained therein), click the “View NeoGuide” link at the top of the listing page.

Whichever location level you’re at, there are two links at the bottom of the page for adding data. Click the one that says “Add a comment.”

The “Add comment” screen pops up. There are fields for your name, location, and so on, plus a larger box for your comment. You don’t have to provide any personal information if you don’t want to. The only field you have to worry about (other than the comment itself, of course), is the e-mail field. To flag your contribution as coming from someone I recruited, you need to enter my ID code in the e-mail field. My ID code is NEO-14. Just like that: three capital letters, dash, one, four. Anything contributed with that code in the e-mail field gets credited to my point total.

Then type your comment. You can add up to 4000 characters; for reference, that’s about a screen and a quarter of normal-sized text at resolution 1024x768, so feel free to be as complete and detailed as you want to be. You can be brief, too, if you prefer, but remember the information needs to be useful to other people, and will have to pass the editor’s quality check. If you call up Detroit and add the comment “this city sucks,” it won’t be approved, it won’t go into the database, and no points are awarded. No profanity or copyrighted information, either; it has to be your own material. Please, use your best judgment.

Then click the Go! button. Your comment will be repeated back to you so you can proofread it and make sure it’s correct. Click Go! again, and that’s all there is to it!

"How do I add an object?"

Also straightforward, but with a couple of additional steps. As above, you can add objects at any level, though of course it usually makes the most sense to add them to the city so they’re more useful to the end user. (It’s possible to have, for example, a small country made up mostly of a lake, but those situations are uncommon.)

On each location page, there are two links at the bottom for adding data. As above, one says “Add a comment,” and the second says “Add a thing.” Click the second one.

You begin the object submission process by identifying the type of object. Is it a restaurant, a monument, or what? Choose the type of object you’re adding using the drop-down box, and then click Continue.

On the next screen, provide the name of the object, its specific type (if a restaurant, is it a bistro, fast food, etc.), and a descriptive comment. You also have fields for your name, where you are, etc. As mentioned above, you don’t have to provide any personal information here if you don’t want to. Again, the only fields you have to worry about are the comment and the e-mail field. As described above, to flag this contribution as coming from someone I recruited, enter my ID code in the e-mail field. My ID code is NEO-14. Just like that: three capital letters, dash, one, four. Anything contributed with that code in the e-mail field gets credited to my point total.

Then, again, add a comment regarding the object. If it’s a restaurant, talk about the type of cuisine, and maybe mention one or two of your favorite dishes. If it’s a hiking trail, you can talk about any views, the difficulty, and so on. Again, please keep usefulness in mind; if you add a diner and just say, “this place stinks,” it won’t get added. If the food’s mediocre, say why, so other people can benefit.

Click Continue, and you go to the next screen, where you get to add “Auxiliary” data. First, you add Features. You’ve got a bunch of check-boxes to describe what the establishment offers. For example, if it’s a hotel, you can click “air conditioning,” “cable TV,” and the like. If it’s a restaurant, you can indicate if it’s just for lunch or dinner, or both, and you can click the appropriate boxes to describe the cuisine. If it’s a beach, you’ve even got a box for “clothing optional.” You can make an “Editor’s Quality Rating,” rating the object on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). Use your judgment for these boxes; “number of rooms” obviously refers to a hotel, so you can disregard it when adding, say, a campground. Almost done!

Click Continue again, and now you’re on the last page. This is where you add “contact” information regarding the object. If it’s a restaurant (or any other place with basically a front door and a parking lot), we need at minimum a phone number or an address, or, preferably, both. It’s pretty easy to call up a web-based yellow-pages (Yahoo has a pretty good one) to get this information, if you don’t have it handy. If it’s some other type of object, like a viewpoint, that obviously doesn’t have a phone, just do what you can.

Then click the last Continue button, and you’re done!

"How do I add a photograph?"

Photographs can be added to anything in the database, whether a location or an object. On the right side of each one’s page is a box showing a thumbnail photo for it. We’ve been focusing on the major destinations, obviously, so out of nearly a hundred thousand locations and half a million objects, only a tiny proportion has a photo. Consider how cool it would be to be able to call up a tiny restaurant in an obscure town and actually see a picture of it. Fodor’s, eat your heart out.

Anyway, if there’s no picture, there’s a link that invites you to add one. Click the link, and you’re taken to a screen where you get to submit your photo. (This assumes, of course, that it’s already scanned or whatever, and is an image file.) Click the browse button, find your file, and click OK. The system will automatically scale your picture, and show you a confirmation screen. If it’s okay, click Yes and go on to the next screen, where you provide a caption to describe the picture, plus a comment if you want. As above, put my code, NEO-14, in the e-mail field. Then click Submit. You can then continue to add pictures for the same object or location, if you like, or go on to something else.

Note that you can’t submit a picture for an object that doesn’t yet exist. If you’ve got a wonderful picture of a funky old antique store in Helena, Montana, but the store isn’t listed, you have to create the store object first. After it shows up in the database (see next subject), you can submit a photo for it.

Guidelines for pictures: They shouldn’t be “people” pictures; this is a travel guide, after all. If it’s a picture of the Great Wall of China, that’s great. But if you and your sweetie are standing with your arms around each other in the foreground, that’s not so great. Think about the types of pictures you see in other travel guides, and use your best judgement.

"How soon do my contributions show up in the database?"

Contributions have to go through a quality check; the database editor, who’s a travel expert himself, has to review everything and approve it if it’s okay. He’s not working on this over the weekend, so give it a couple of working days. If you submit something today (Saturday), it should be there by Tuesday or Wednesday, and so on.

"Anything else?"

Not much, really, other than to repeat that the database and site are still pre-launch, so some of the text will be rewritten (for example, after you submit something, the site says “You rock!”). But basically, this is a really exciting project, and I want to give everyone on the SDMB the opportunity to contribute to it. (Plus, I could win a trip. :)) If everyone who reads this submits just one item a day, that could potentially be hundreds, if not thousands, of new entries. It’s going to be The World’s Largest Travel Database, and you’ll all have a piece of it!

If you have questions or difficulties about using the site, post them here, and I’ll do my best to address them.

THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR YOUR HELP WITH THIS!

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Oh, by the way, in case anyone’s been reading my movie review website, my involvement with this project is a big part of why I’ve been unable to keep up with the reviews.

Only so many hours in the day, don’tcha know. I’ll be catching up shortly…

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I’m not much help, but I admire your efforts.
Wish I was part of the action on the web. Hope you get your kicks out of it. Sounds like a winner.

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Update: I’m in second place, but falling back…

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I just uploaded a picture of Cabo San Lucas and filled out the whole page and the fucking submit button won’t work! Fuck!

And just think, I was going to write long reviews on Cabo and Montego Bay this weekend…

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Make that the “continue>>>” button.
POS!

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Definitely interesting. The potential is pretty good, and this reminds me a lot of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). I have two concerns:

  1. You’ll end up with lame-o write-ups from people who are just cattle-herd tourists
  2. You’ll end up with a ton of spam-type entries from companies wishing to promote their own restaurant/shop/nose hair clipper, whatever.

In the end, if you have enough numbers, it’ll pan out fine. Just don’t expect it to all get filled up right away. IMDB took years to grow, and it’s still growing.

Question: What is your revenue based on? Just curious. Is it just click-through ads? Or will you provide travel services, like Travelocity? Hope you guys sustain enough funding (and eventually, make money) enough that you can have both a deep AND wide database. Good luck!

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Demo: Sorry to hear you were having problems. I’ll try uploading a photo myself today and see what happens.

Baglady: Definitely good concerns. To address them – All submissions have to go through our travel editor, who can disallow the lame-o material and spam. And our revenue isn’t based on the website; the site is basically a demonstration storefront. Revenue comes from licensing the content to travel providers who want to link comprehensive information to their products; we’ve got major interest from Expedia, a couple of airlines, and such. Because it’s a database, they can structure and link the information any way they like. This website’s there to demonstrate one possible application approach, and as yet another means of growing the database. Very powerful.

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I did, and, of course, it worked fine. I don’t know what was going on for you, but I uploaded two different pictures using the web interface with no problems. I wish I knew how to help, but it seems okay on my end…

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Cervaise, it depends on how my workweek goes, but I think I’ll be able to help you out.

I’m all over Kyiv, Ukraine, Prague and other Czech Republic cities, Bucharest, Romania, and Budapest, Hungary. I have photos, too, I think. I can also add some stuff to Washington, D.C. if it looks necessary.

I can’t promise I’ll have time, but don’t lose hope - it will be fun for me to write stuff.

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UPDATE: The URL has changed!

The above address is being transitioned to this one literally as I write this:

http://neoworldguide.neoinformatics.com/cgi-bin/main.cgi

Also, re the scores – I’m just barely hanging in third place, and continuing to crank in submissions to hold position. HUGE thanks to everybody who’s made contributions using my code!

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Dont worry cervaise, I’ll win this for you. You know how much crap is crammed into central florida?