eTourism: Multimedia Brochures and Communication Chains

This paper is about multimedia communication, for Tourism. Two original concepts are introduced: Multimedia Brochure and Communication Chain. A Multimedia Brochure is an agile and versatile interactive multimedia available for all kinds of devices and technologies: it can be used by any “actor” of tourism in order to make itself “visible” and “persuasive” over Internet. An innovative authoring environment and a streamlined production workflow allow effective production, combining good quality and low cost. The Communication Chain allows the interchange of (fragments of) multimedia brochures across different actors (e.g. cultural heritage, accommodation, food, shopping, sport, entertainment,…), avoiding (or at least minimizing) duplication, confusion and low quality, the occurrence which are frequent to be found today. The COMFIT project demonstrates, on a medium scale, the viability and the effectiveness of the approach.