Applying Semantic Web to E-Tourism

Abstract

Traditional E-Tourism applications store data internally in a form that is not interoperable with similar systems. Hence, tourist agents spend plenty of time updating data about vacation packages in order to provide good service to their clients. On the other hand, their clients spend plenty of time searching for the ‘perfect’ vacation package as the data about tourist offers are not integrated and are available from different spots on the Web. We developed Travel Guides - a prototype system for tourism management to illustrate how semantic web technologies combined with traditional E-Tourism applications: a.) help integration of tourism sources dispersed on the Web b) enable creating sophisticated user profiles. Maintaining quality user profiles enables system personalization and adaptivity of the content shown to the user. The core of this system is in ontologies – they enable machine readable and machine understandable representation of the data and more importantly reasoning.