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Travel Guide Ontology

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Travel Guides is a prototype system that combines Semantic Web technologies with those used in mainstream applications in order to enable data exchange between different E-Tourism systems. Travel Guides facilitates the processes of:

  • maintaining the systems for tourist agencies, and
  • searching for perfect vacation packages for tourists.

 

The core of Travel Guides system is in ontologies:

  1. The World ontology comprises concepts and relations from the real world: geographical terms, locations with coordinates, land types, time and date, time zone, currency, languages, and all other terms that are expressing concepts related in a way to tourism or tourists. However, the World ontology does not cover vacation packages that could be offered by tourist agencies. This ontology also contains the general concepts necessary for expression of semantic annotation, indexing, and retrieval. We use PROTON Upper Module ontology as The World Ontology.
  2. The User ontology contains concepts related to the travellers. This ontology describes user interests and activities, age groups, favourite travel companies, and other data about different types of users and user profiles. We extended the PROTON Knowledge management module with domain-related concepts and relations to create the User ontology.
  3. Travel ontology is an extension of the World ontology i.e. the PROTON Upper Module ontology. It contains the concepts related to vacation packages, types of vacations, and traveller types w.r.t. various tourist destinations. It includes all terms being specific to vacation packages offered in tourist agencies and being important for travellers, such as the type of accommodation, food service type, transport service, room types in a hotel, and the like. It is an ontology that makes an indirect connection between users and destinations. This is accomplished by creating user profiles for the users, and determining the type of destination for each vacation package. Finally, certain user profiles are linked to appropriate destination types.

For more information about Travel Guides, contact Ms Danica Damljanovic.