William Davis

City parks and outdoor recreational opportunities are among Toronto’s most valued resources. The Discovery Walks Program has been one of Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation’s flagship outreach efforts to engage residents and tourists alike in learning about culturally and environmentally significant areas across the city. The purpose of this research project is to determine best practices for updating traditional urban wayfinding systems using web mapping applications, spatial database creation, spatial and non-spatial queries, and interactive web design. The Western Beaches and Ravines Discovery Walk was used as a testing ground for prototyping an interactive and dynamic mobile web mapping application oriented toward digital tourism. Development of the mobile mapping tool used HyperText Markup Language (HTML5) with several Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and libraries such as jQuery and Google Maps. The completed web application has the potential to advance the traditional paper-based wayfinding methods used on the Discovery Walks by giving tourists, educators, and explorers a digital environment that could improve wayfinding with geolocation technology and an interactive user-interface, in-depth information related to features based on proximity, and customization of the Discovery Walk based on a users’ specific interests. Limitations of this project, and more broadly of digital tourism, are discussed and include expertise needed to create a digital tourism platform, the cost of development, the assumption that users have access to geolocation technology, third party reliance on dynamic information, and the potential drawbacks associated with users focusing on the application rather than on the natural environment that surrounds them.