Nhan Dan- Information about Vietnam is now lost amidst information sea of the digital era. It’s difficult for tourists, particularly foreigners, to fund comprehensive information about the beauty of Vietnam land. Therefore, to further advertising tourism and culture with high technology is considered an outlet for the development of Vietnam’s tourism sector.
For many years, information technology solutions have been applied to develop tourism and culture in many countries. However, it’s still new in Vietnam.
In many developed countries, advanced technology has helped them to solve many issues in cultural preservation and tourism development. The Geographical Information System (GIS) which is now popular in European and American countries, is an example.
This technology has helped to serve the information searching of tourists, tourism planning, marketing and advertising. The application of this technology in Vietnam is only in its initial steps, mainly in digitalised data.
Some localities such as Binh Dinh and Thua Thien Hue have applied the GIS to set up tools to assist tourists. The Institute of Culture and Arts of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism now plans to apply the GIS to open a website on the cultural heritage of the Central Highlands gongs.
Since 2004, the Department of Cultural Heritage has carried out the project on mapping and totalising Cham cultural heritage in Vietnam in the three provinces of Quang Nam, Quang Ngai and Phu Yen on a trial basis.
However, according to Dr Tran Duc Anh Son who is in charge of mapping Champa cultural heritage sites in Thua Thien Hue province, the application of GIS in Vietnam faces many difficulties due to the backward in technology and equipment as well as a lack of knowledge in using high technology of cultural and tourism staff.
Head of the Institute of Research for Tourism Development Vu Ngoc Binh said while the cultural sector has had standards for the classification of places of interests, there’s yet to have criteria to rate the attractiveness of tourism sites. This also hinders the establishment of data base of tourism advertisement and management.
The cultural preservation and tourism development is now facing challenges in a developing society of the integration period. The application of advanced information technology will help popularise the special cultural values of Vietnam along with humanity’s cultural values.