The Development of the Nawatwithi OTOP Community and the Promotion of Tourism through Geographic Information System (GIS) of Lampang Province

Abstract

This study was to: 1) develop local economic foundations in order to generate income for the local people of Nawatwithi OTOP communities, one of the Thai government-initiated policies for sustainable tourism, in Lampang Province, aiming at these two goals (i.e. to increase their quality of life more thoroughly and to strengthen the local economic and social conditions more sustainably) and 2) interlink the various tourism routes in the province (e.g. from city main routes to minor or community ones and vice versa) in order to make them more outstanding and ready for the local tourism on the basis of the genuine identity of Nawatwithi OTOP community. The subjects in this study included 30 Nawatwithi OTOP communities of Lampang Province. The tools for data elicitation were Geographic Information System (GIS) for promoting the local tourism of the Nawatwithi OTOP communities, the quality assessment form, and the satisfaction questionnaire. The statistics for data analysis were mean and standard deviation.

            The results of the study reveal these three major findings. First, the evaluation of geo-informatics system of the OTOP communities can be divided into 2 parts: 1) the main system that provides overall data for inclusive management and 2) the subsystem that tailors to individual community management. Second, the quality assessment of GIS for promoting the tourism of the Nawatwithi OTOP communities by five experts indicated that the quality was at the highest level ( = 4.52, S.D. = 0.60). Third and lastly, the results of the questionnaire showed that the subjects were satisfied with the system at a high level ( = 4.63, S.D. = 0.51).