Semantic Web and ETourism

1
Semantic Web and E-Tourism

• Riina Henriksson

2
E-Tourism

• Characteristics of E-Tourism
• Tourism product
• Value chain
• Industry structure
• ICT infrastructure

• Challenges in electronic marketplace development
• Legacy systems
• Heterogeneous information
• No global standards for data exchange
• Seamless interoperability

3
Traditional tourism value chain
4
Interoperability Problem

• Information-level interoperability
• Service-level interoperability
• Semantic and representational clashes
• Fully mappable and nonmappable clashes

5
Harmonise Project

• is funded by European Commission as part of the
  5th Framework Programme.
• aims at building a technological infrastructure
  base on a shared ontology, to enhance the
  cooperation of European SMEs in tourism sector
• the interoperability problem in tourism can be
  resolved by putting emphasis on the combination
  of a social consensus process with the
  application of new technologies

6
Tourism Harmonisation Network

• Tourism Harmonisation Network (THN) is an open
  international consortium
• The key role of the THN is to build the mediating
  domain ontology - Interoperable Minimum
  Harmonisation Ontology (IMHO)
• The first version of the IMHO covers the
  sub-domains of accommodation and event
  activities.

7
Harmonise Platform

• Fixed obligatory standards, which define all
  details of the exchanged messages are not
  successful in tourism industry
• Mediation, ontologies and semantic web can be
  combined into a platform which will allow
  information exchange, where participating tourism
  organisations can keep their data format as it is
  while cooperating with each other

8
Harmonise Approach
9
Customization Phase

• Step 1 Ontology Export
• in the customization phase and RDFS
  representation of the mediating ontology is
  exported from the ontology repository to the
  mapping process.
• Step 2 Conceptual Normalization
• The governing schema of a source data
  representation is lifted to a local conceptual
  model also represented in RDFS format.

10
Step 3 Semantic Mapping
11
Cooperation Phase

• Step 4 Data Normalization
• The local instance data are transformed into an
  image of the local conceptual data. The output is
  a set of local normalized data in RDF format. 
• Step 5 Semantic Reconciliation
• After obtaining the normalised local instance
  data in RDF format, these are transformed in the
  Harmonise Interchange Representation (instances
  of IMHO) using the Semantic Map the output of the
  corresponding mapping process.

12
HARMO-TEN Project

• Harmonise project is a base for another
  European project HARMO-TEN (Tourism Harmonisation
  Trans-European Network eTEN), which aims to
  create an electronic space for tourism
  stakeholders where all businesses in the
  marketplaces should be enabled to exchange their
  information in a seamless, semiautomatic manner,
  independent from geographical, linguistic and
  technological boundaries.

13
EU Framework Programmes

• Under the EU's Fifth Framework Programme
  (1998-2002), the Semantic Web action line
  resulted in around 30 projects involving over 250
  research and industry organisations.
• In the current Sixth Framework Programme, the
  research aims at maximising the automation of the
  complete knowledge lifecycle and achieving
  semantic interoperability between web resources
  and services

14
HI-TOUCH

• E-organisational metHodology and tools for
  Intra-European sustainable TOUrism
• The aim is to develop software tools to be used
  by travel agency sales assistants for providing a
  tourist prospect with the best-adapted offer
• Assistance tools are based on ITC new tools (XML,
  Java, Flash, ontological data bases and semantic
  descriptors, multi-lingual thesaurus)
• One of the work-packages includes development of
  semantic database multi-lingual thesaurus,
  inventory of tourism resources and implementation
  of authoring tools on the semantic database

15
SATINE

• Semantic-based Interoperability Infrastructure
  for Integrating Web Service Platforms to
  Peer-to-Peer Networks
• Aim is to realize a semantic based infrastructure
  which will allow the Web services on
  well-established service registries like UDDI or
  ebXML to seamlessly interoperate with Web
  services on P2P Networks.
• The travel ontologies to be developed and the
  semantics of the Web services will be based on
  standard specifications like the one produced by
  Open Travel Alliance.

16
IM_at_GINE IT

• Intelligent Mobility AGents, Advanced Positioning
  and Mapping Technologies INtEgration
  Interoperable MulTimodal, location based services
  
• IM_at_GINE IT project aims to develop one and single
  access point, through which the end user can
  obtain location-based, intermodal transport
  information, mapping and routing, navigation and
  other related services everywhere in Europe,
  anytime, taking into account personal preferences
  of the user.
• One of the milestones is the development of
  common transport and tourism ontologies for
  semantic web applications