About us
About the concept
Although Culisite is on the internet we haven’t conceived it as your average ‘website’. It is more like the digital version of a ‘guide’, rather like the Michelin Guide, the Gault Millau, the Champerard etc. This is all the more obvious and attractive when you use the guide on a tablet like an iPad. Tablet users were the target audience we had in mind when we first developed the guide. We pictured the tourist who arrives in Europe with the iPad in his hand, and navigates his way around hotels, restaurants and sights using the guide, which gives him all the information he needs conveniently grouped together.
About the project
Culisite is a project in full development: we know that the guide is far from complete at the moment. Belgium is fully covered, for some countries only the main centres are included, depending on their touristic importance, and some countries are not yet covered.
The language
As this is a European guide, and our target audience will come from all corners of the world, we have chosen to make the guide in English to start with. IN later versions we may include multilingual personalisation, but as a point of departure we have chosen the English language.
How to use the guide
In this first version of the guide we have included two ways of navigating: on the one hand there is the geographical navigation, whereby the highest level is a province, and this can be refined to an area within a town. These results can be finetuned further by indicating exactly what you are looking for within this region: sights, hotels, restaurants, lifestyle, etc.
Besides the navigation tool with the selection fields it is also possible to search a keyword, whereby this can be both the name of a location or of a business. In later versions we will also include the possibility to navigate graphically through the maps in the centre of the guide.
Besides the two ways to navigate through the guide, the guide itself consists of two main sections: the guide itself and the top rankings, depending on the geographical level this could be a list of the best 40 (of a country), 30 (of a regions) of 20 (of a province). These rankings are based on our own system of points, the dots.
The points system of dots
The majority of the hotels, restaurants, sights and lifestyle facilities are given an appreciation. These are indicated by ‘dots’, ranging from 1 to 5 in various colours. The exact meaning of these dots depends on the type of business. The dots are explained in the guide legend at the top of the guide.
It is very important to know what exactly the points system is based on, for it is at the very heart of the guide. Obviously we don’t just throw an opinion online. We have our own mathematical programme whereby the values that at least three internationally recognised guides (such as the Michelin Guide, the Gault Millau, the Champerard and others) attributed to the business are combined and an average is calculated. Therefore, we can claim that our scaling system with the dots is more objective than the points given by any single guide, however good its reputation. Of course, every year when the new guides are published we introduce this information into our system so that our values remain up to date.
If you keep this background information in mind when you use the guide, it should help you to find quite a precise result with a minimum of clicks. This results will give you a personalised selection of hotels, restaurants, sights or lifestyle facilities in a particular region, province or town. As most tablet computers have a GPS, and as this is usually based on data from Google Maps, it should only be a small step to transfer ones personal list from the guide to these locations in the GPS software, so that personalised routes will be offered as a feature in the very near future.
