Visitors to Olympic venues in Beijing and the six other co-host cities can now locate information desks, entrances and restrooms on a 20-language website before they arrive.

The maps, available at Tomap.cn, provide details of each of the 39 Olympic venues in the seven cities.

In addition to listing the events being held at each venue, the maps show major landmarks, points of public transit, restrooms, first-aid rooms - even water coolers. It can be downloaded free of charge to mobile phones.

The maps are currently in nine languages, but designers expect it to be available in 15 to 20 languages by tomorrow.

The idea was initiated by a group of volunteers in March.

"When I went to see a football match, I had to walk around the stadium for quite a while before I finally found the entrance," Zhang Zhen, the online map designer, said.

"The instruction boards inside the stadium were not very helpful.

"A clear map could save lots of trouble during the Olympics, when spectators will be pouring into all of the sports stadiums," he added.

Zhang, 31, is general manager of the Shanghai IT company that devised both the Pudong International Airport and Maglev computer systems.

His team includes the manager of a software company specializing in map layout, a web designer from Shanghai-based East China Normal University, and a design director of a Beijing Internet company.

Diomede Calzini, an Italian proprietor of a children's store in Shanghai, has offered to translate the map into Italian.

"The biggest difficulty was amassing correct and detailed terrain information, as many sports stadiums were still under construction at the time," Zhang said. He has traveled twice to Beijing to gather accurate information about the Olympic venues.

His team of volunteers worked with college students and linguists on translating the map into 20 languages, including English, French, Japanese and German.

The website, launched last week, had received more than 13,000 hits as of yesterday.

(China Daily August 6, 2008)