by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
The land of the thousand lakes. To be precise, it’s a land of ~190,000 lakes. Finns created Linux kernel, IRC, SSH, baby box, Molotov cocktail. Any of you loved automobile tires made by a smartphone company or smartphones made by a rubber company — famous Nokia? Remember post-Nokia buttonless phones introduced 10+ years ago? And the killer game — Angry Birds? It’s Finland, and today we are introducing Curious Finland.
Do you know why Rovio Entertainment designed Angry Birds to attack the evil pigs? Why pigs? Because it was Swine Flu epidemic: “The first game in the series was initially released on 31 December 2009 for iOS. At the time, the swine flu epidemic was in the news, so the staff decided to use pigs as the enemies of the angry birds.” iOS Game Updates.
We predict that post-COVID travel will be different. Fewer packages but more custom journeys. Less public transport but more cars. We said that before COVID back in September 2019 in our Curiosio Play post. Let’s see how the world is changing, and build new travel habits for the new world.
To ensure that the density and quality of our knowledge graph in Finland are sufficient we took inspiration from the credible road trips there and created interactive versions of them. For each travel story, we took the mentioned geo names, duration, budget (if known), and threw them all together onto the algorithm.
Classical Finland
“Visit Helsinki and the vicinity. …then see the two other major destinations in the country, the cities of Tampere and historic Turku. …then Turku as an embarkation point for the Åland islands.” Frommer’s.
Historical Road in Southwestern Finland
“Hämeen Härkätie or the Häme Oxen Road is a historical road in southwestern Finland leading from Turku to Hämeenlinna; the country’s oldest city to today’s city of Hämeenlinna which was established in the late 13th century by the building of Häme castle (Hämeen linna). …There are traces of this routing being used as early as the 9th century. The road connects two important places settled during the Iron Age, the Aurajoki river valley and the surroundings of Lake Vanaja.” Wikivoyage.
King’s Road
“The King’s Road (Finnish: Kuninkaantie, Swedish: Kungsvägen) was once the most important road in Finland, connecting Turku to Vyborg and the towns and villages between, along the southern coast. …The King’s Road was part of a medieval mail road that stretched from Bergen in today’s Norway to Vyborg in today’s Russia. The King’s Road itself referred to the easternmost part of the route, eastwards from Turku. The part that connects Turku to Stockholm, across the archipelago and Åland, is known as the Great Mail Route (Fi. Suuri Postitie, Sw. Stora Postvägen).” Wikivoyage.
Finland in Ten Days by Car
“Finland in ten days by car is a suggested route showing some of the most important sights in Finland. …Compared to other European countries in general, Finland is quite sparsely populated, especially in the north. …if you want to see the countryside the best way is definitely driving. The best time to do this journey is in the summer.” Wikivoyage.
Archipelago Drive
“The Archipelago Trail or Archipelago Ring Road (Finnish: Saariston rengastie) is a route in the Archipelago Sea in Finland, which uses roads and ferry connections to visit many of the major islands in this archipelago. …the Archipelago Trail allows seeing much of it by road. The itinerary passes through the main villages of the western and northern archipelago, while the ferry passages give you some feeling also for the archipelago as seen by boat, with fine views of this unique land of sea and rocky islands.” Wikivoyage.
The drive is inspired by the Archipelago Trail and is not a copy of it. Some ferries are too slow, thus the route by Curiosio is a bit different.
and More
To test each travel story we have to parse it for geo points manually. We wish this could be done by a machine… It’s a GeoNER problem in NLP.
GeoNER stands for Geographic Named Entity Recognition. Imagine you are reading a travel article from National Geographic. You want to make a trip plan from that story. Assuming you are reading it from a browser. You are clicking a browser extension and the extension extracts all geo points from the article. You copy all those points into Curiosio search box; set the desired duration of the trip, number of travelers, budget, and get trip plans that fit all those requirements. It already works from the moment you got all the points you are interested in — it’s [Supertrip] function. Will it work before that moment? One student is currently experimenting exactly with that kind of geoparsing in the scope of his diploma. Here is his GitHub project called geoner.
