Tourists visiting Ilan County’s Fushan Botanical Garden (褔山植物園) can now use a digital tour guide, the park administration said yesterday.
“Tourists can use a decoder to scan the two-dimensional barcodes that are exhibited at the bottom right-hand corner of the display plates of each plant, linking them directly to the correct page of the Council of Agriculture’s [COA] online Digital Agricultural Ecosystem Museum [DAEM] to read more about the plants,” a park administration researcher surnamed Chang said.
The decoder can be any digital device that has an Internet connection — such as a cellphone or personal digital assistant (PDA) — Chang said, adding that a free copy of the decoder software can be downloaded onto people’s cellphones on the DAEM Web site.
“Once the barcode is scanned and decoded by the cellphone, the phone will connect to a multi-media page showing its users information about the plants,” Chang said. “The information would be useful for, say, students who are visiting the botanical garden on a field trip.”
The advantage of using a barcode to link to the COA’s online database is that providing a scannable barcode instead of a Web address eliminates the possibility of typos when users want to retrieve the correct Web page, Chang said.
“In addition, an online database can hold more information than any display plate, and the database can be updated frequently according to season,” he said.
Though two-dimensional barcodes are not yet prevalent in the nation, they are beginning to appear more frequently, Chang said.
“For example, agricultural goods that bear a production resume have a two-dimensional barcode sticker on them so consumers can scan the vegetables with their cellphones and immediately find out how it was produced,” he said.
People who currently do not own gadgets like a PDA or cellphone with wireless connection should not be discouraged, as they can borrow one of the botanical garden’s PDAs, Chang said.
“I have seen families borrow them and look up every plant in the garden,” he said.
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