Web Development

The Content Management System (CMS) allows us to keep destination related content and information in a single system and then the content could be distributed among external systems effectively. 
If we look into more features, content are associated with “terms” which are used for filtering content based on various parameters. For an example, the destinations can be given as terms and content of different type can be associated to the destinations easily. Terms can be ordered in a hierarchy and content can be associated with multiple terms. This way, the content can be managed very effectively and content duplication is minimal. It also supports multi lingual features where as users can enter content for same entity in different languages and those can be queried by passing the required language id.
The strong user management features of the CMS:

Geographic Information System (GIS).

The importance of a Geographic Information System in a destination management system is very high. Because, destinations are geographic locations and when managing destinations, geographic referencing is much easier than manual association of entities. The GIS uses a backend spatial database and an API to provide feature rich GIS functionality. It is given as an API and thus different systems can use the API to query for different types of information collection. The GIS consists of three layers to provide scalable solution.

The spatial Database & GIS Core API layer has the functionality to do geographic processing and by using that the Intermediate Processing Layer combines geographic data with Content and Product data using the DMS Core. Then this processed information is given out by using the high level DMS GIS API, which is used by external systems to send spatial queries to the DMS. This is a very scalable and flexible architecture since the changes to each layer can be done independently without affecting to other layers.

DMS Core

We could say that DMS Core is the brain of the ATS. Because, the DMS Core has been built to integrate three separate systems to provide a complete and robust solution the end user. The Core defines the Destination Hierarchy, and parameters related to integration of the three systems. It combines the three systems intelligently to provide destination related information and services in a seamless manner. It also handles the classification of entities and acts as and intermediate interface for each individual systems to exchange information with each other.

This effective strategy helps to separate the destination management specific functionality into a separate layer and hence it provides an easy method to alter these functionalities without affecting teach external individual system.

The main idea behind defining architecture like this is to group common functionalities together and keep them separate from others and so make these separate components “pluggable” to the DMS. Therefore each component can be changed without much effort, rather than the need to change the whole solution