**1. Introduction**

In Japan, the central government declared "Healthy Japan 21" in 2000, put the Health Promotion Law into force in 2003, and spelled out the measures and policies for the promotion of citizens' health by self-supervision. It is pointed out that the increase of human body activities centering on walking should lead to suppress cardiovascular diseases and cancer and prolong human lifespan. Therefore, the main objective of the "Healthy Japan 21 first

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(2000–2012)" was to increase the numbers of walking steps and those who continue some physical exercises (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare [1]). In the "Healthy Japan 21 second (2013–2023)," the improvement of the environment to continue walking was added to the main objective (Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare [2]). Additionally, according to the public opinion survey conducted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology [3], it was evident that walking is the most popular sport among Japanese because it is easy for everyone to start it. In this way, regardless of age or sex, it is possible for everyone to easily work on walking in everyday life. Walking is the most suitable physical activity (PA) especially for elder people because it is possible for them to prevent the drop of physical strength and body ability by aging.

On the other hand, currently, Japan finds itself in the position of a "developed" country,- facing many serious challenges to declining birth rate, aging population, and the environment and energy issues, that it must address head-on, challenges, which other countries will 1 day also be facing. Therefore, in most of the Japanese cities, it is essential to realize "compact town development" that puts homes and places of work in close proximity to each other appears to be one effective way of making it easier to face the above serious- challenges. Walkability is a concept to comprehensively show the situations of the physical environment of the urban space to support and promote walking in everyday life. An environmental approach, which ameliorates the urban space to improve and promote residents' health, attracts attention all over the world, and walkability is placed as the important- point. An increase in the number of steps, that is, an increase in walking time, is related to the walkability factors such as sidewalks, landscapes, and traffic safety, which influence on- walking time (Inoue et al. [4]).

One of the methods to explicitly provide geospatial information related to the above walkability factors is geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is a powerful tool to overlay, analyze, maintain, and share various kinds of geospatial information on the digital map, referring to the longitude, latitude, and height. Therefore, it is possible to visually display geospatial information concerning the above walkability factors on the digital map of the Web-GIS to efficiently support walking.-

Based on the background mentioned above, the present study aims to design, develop, operate, and evaluate a walking support system, which integrates a Web-GIS as a base system, an social networking services (SNS), and a registration system of walking information, while taking into account the users' needs, which can change according to the circumstances (each user's health conditions, needs, and preferences). The system efficiently provides various information related to walking to support many generations, and it is expected that it will enable users to control their health by themselves.
