A guidance system is a virtual or physical device, or a group of devices implementing a guidance process used for controlling the movement of a ship, aircraft, missile, rocket, satellite, or any other moving object. Guidance is the process of calculating the changes in position, velocity, attitude, and/or rotation rates of a moving object required to follow a certain trajectory and/or attitude profile based on information about the object's state of motion[1][2][3]. An e-Guidance system will also incorporate information technology in the process described above. It will use the information available to guide a device or a human along a specific path, or towards a specific location. The word ‘e-Guidance’ is used in this project in the sense of guiding the user to a location which he has no prior knowledge about, but the system has information that his preference (of birds in this case) will be found on the particular location. Of course the system will use the data of its database and the experiences of previous users of the system to decide the locations.
Avitourism, or avian tourism, is travel and tourism that focuses on and highlights local birding opportunities. Avitourism is one of the fastest growing types of environmental tourism, or ecotourism. This type of travel takes advantage of birding-related events, and many tourist destinations promote birding festivals, hotspots, trails, preserves, parks and other locations to encourage birders to visit an area.
Sri Lanka is a bird paradise with 463 resident species. There are 26 endemic birds [4]. Most of them are found in the wet zone. The winter migrants come from distant Siberia and Western Europe. The reservoirs attract vast number of water birds. The forests attract many other species. There are many bird sanctuaries across the little island 270 km by 140 km in size. Therefore, it is believed that Sri Lanka is a paradise for birdwatchers.
Although there are many enthusiastic bird watchers in Sri Lanka, there is no proper way to find locations for them to engage in bird watching. Therefore many birdwatchers are limited to a small number of well known locations. Also there are some birdwatchers who have visited unknown locations and who like to explore new birdwatching areas. An e-Guidance system will break the knowledge barrier between those two groups. It will help to share their knowledge in an indirect way so that everybody can find new birdwatching sites. And it will help the birdwatchers to keep their focus on observing birds instead of thinking about where to go next or refering their tangible material about the bird they just saw which will be a difficult task while travelling. Also it has the facility to identify birds by giving the basic characteristics of a bird as input, so the amateur birdwatchers will find birdwatching an interesting hobby although they don’t have much knowledge about birds.
LITERATURE REVIEW Our work was inspired by the mobile learning system for scaffolding bird watching learning[6] by Yuh-Shyan Chen (2003). They have developed a learning system for students who are learning about birdwatching. Their technology was based on PDAs(Personal Digital Assistant) and a wireless mobile ad-hoc network.
A Bird-watching Database System[7] by Conny Andersson (2013) describes the development of a database management system which is integrated with a graphical user interface. The data files contained the bird sightings from the year 2009 in North America. It stored the details of the bird, details of the spotted location and details of the observer in the database. Effective querying of data was provided by the graphical user interface.