Information Sources for a Geographic Information System based on Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is a rich country in its inherited beauty, with attractive sceneries, and incomparable geographic locations. These natural resources can be used to contribute to the development process of the country and gain great amount of foreign exchange through tourism. Information systems developed focusing on geo information can provide a great leverage for this. Although there are number of mobile apps developed as geographic information systems, it is hard to find an application with a rich database of accurate location information. Here is a brief discussion on the web information sources for such apps based on Sri Lanka.
           The official site of Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority provides a heavy bunch of reliable information for such a project. Anyone can visit that site and get a detailed list of places with a value of tourism. The site is nicely arranged with beautiful sceneries. Places suggested for pilgrimage is also featured with a brief description. But the photos are not tagged with the exact location details. Therefore it is really difficult to locate the photos in the exact location on a map. You can visit the site with this URL. http://srilanka.travel/index.php

       

                                                                                                                                                                                              

                                                      
             Another information resource we could find was http://withanage.tripod.com/, a site with a full description for each place that it has featured. Sometimes they have provided high definition pictures along with the descriptions. The site has organized in a clear manner that anyone can easily reach for the type of information they need. For an instance, http://withanage.tripod.com has a separate section for images.  Similar to the previous, this site also does not provide information with exact longitides and latitudes.
http://www.scenicsrilanka.com is also a rich data source for a geographic information system, if you are looking for reliable information. The specialty in that site is, all the photos it has presented are tagged with the exact location name and followed with a detailed description. In fact they have organized the site to present information in different aspects such as wild life, beaches, Holiday Resorts, Shopping places etc. Therefore it’s really useful for a GIS app presenting diverse information on the map.

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http://sandjboy.hubpages.com/ is a tourist guidance site and it has few of articles written on Sri Lanka. These articles are leveraged with real-time photos uploaded by the writers.  The special advantage for an information seeker is that each post of this site is followed by number of comments. Therefore people can verify about the reliability of the information it presents.
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/sri-lanka/ and http://goldensrilanka.com/places/ are another such information sources with the similar features. But these sites have less number of posts on Sri Lanka.
http://www.vacationssrilanka.com/ will be the first choice for a geo information seeker who looks for details of only tourism related popular places. However http://www.vascoplanet.com/world/srilanka/ is the best source, for a one who is searching for a large number of photos of the same place or nearby places with different angles. The photos are organized as popular places as well as different topics such as trees, mountains, oceans etc. Every image has presented with high definition.
 Some sites do not constraint the scope into locations. These sources have information other than the locations. Such as Cultural information, day to day life activities of Sri Lankans, etc. This kind of information is also useful when it comes to building reliable and sustainable mobile apps. http://www.travellerspoint.com/photos/ , http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Sri_Lanka  are some of the web sites that present such data.  It can be clearly seen that, there is a huge lack of geographic information sources about Sri Lanka on the web.                                            
Almost all the information sources that are currently available, do not provide photos and descriptions along with accurate longitude, latitude details. This has been a major problem when it comes to developing geographic information systems specifically focused on Sri Lanka. Therefore there is a huge need of a proper geographic information resource for Sri Lanka along with all the possible types of information.