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Scarcity of up-to date travel information about Indonesia has prompted an information system lecturer to develop an integrated online data source for travel and tourism in the country.

Nur Aini Rahmawati, also known as Iin, a lecturer at the 10 November Institute of Technology (ITS) in Surabaya, told the Jakarta Globe that the idea to develop the project, Nusantara View (http://poss.its.ac.id/risetnv/) came to her when she found it so easy to get online travel information about Taiwan, where she studied for her master’s degree.

“I could find almost any information [I needed] to travel there. I could always get to my destination safely and never got lost despite my poor Chinese,” she said, adding that it made her wonder why similar information was not available in Indonesia.

Iin decided to put her idea to provide similar information into action. She submitted her concept to the Indonesia Information Communication and Technology Awards (Inaicta) 2008 in the tourism category.

She entered the competition again this year with the support of her students and won a special mention award.

T he project earned Iin and her students Rp 50 million ($5,300) in start-up capital from the State Ministry for Research and Technology. The money will be used to develop the Web site, which brings together in one place Indonesia tourism-related information from sites such as Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Weather and Facebook.

Iin and her team plan to eventually make the Web site interactive, with users able to contribute information, submit events and identify hotels and restaurants on maps.

“We are currently drafting the policies for contributors,” said Radityo Prasetianto Wibowo, one of Iin’s ITS colleagues who is also involved in the project. He added that the Web site could help promote Indonesian tourism since the information it contained would be generated from reviews and updates from tourists themselves.

He said Nusantara’s content could also serve as a tourism data base for each region.

“This could also ease the regions’ burden in managing and updating their own Web sites using individual Web masters,” Radityo said, adding that Nusantara View compiled data from various sources by using Joomla!, an open source content management system for building Web sites and online applications.

Radityo said that Nusantara View, which has five developers and two designers, had become a joint final assignment project for a group of students at the information system department’s e-business ITS laboratory.

“We are now starting to focus on marketing the Web site,” he said.

Radityo said that the ITS team planned to form a partnership with local social networking sites to save local bandwidth allocation for local users.

Iin said that through the project, she also wanted to change people’s perception that using an open source-based application was somehow inferior just because it was free.

“It can help in customizing a Web site and making it different from others,” she said.