Leading-edge Developments in Tourism Ict and Related Underlying Technologies

The tourism industry uses Internet technologies extensively, despite some significant shortcomings. The shortcomings of the current Internet technologies include information overload, difficulty in information finding and extraction, as well as interpretation of the information between different resources. The semantic web, as the next generation web, uses background knowledge about the meaning of the content stored in machineprocessable and interpretable form. Ontology can be used at the core of semantic web-based systems to develop intelligent tourism information systems. This paper provides a brief overview of tourism ontology, its need, development tools and process, and benchmark projects carried out across the globe in this sector. It concludes with suggestions for future intelligent applications of ontologies and the semantic web for creating intelligent tourism information systems that can enhance the web presence for small to medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs). Introduction Recent advancements in the information and communication technologies (ICT) have introduced a fundamental change in business as well as personal communications. This has caused a shift in traditional business models, and consequently, in the way their information should be managed and utilised. To a great extent, the tourism industry is an information business; therefore, to manage and provide efficient services, different tourism companies form alliances when additional skills/resources are needed to fulfil the business needs. For instance, travel agencies typically offer aggregated or value-added services composed of components supplied by a number of different organisations. However, most of these organisations use heterogeneous legacy systems for internal information storage, and use specific data models and different computational platforms that lead to interoperability problems. This applies more often than not, to SMTEs. When tourism information is looked at from a consumer perspective, there are two extremes: large tourism operators using web technologies connected to a centralised information system linked to in-house reservation systems; and SMTEs that use a simple websites as an electronic brochure. Often their communication with prospective clients is via phone and email. They usually reference their website in regional portals or give their content to centralised tourism repositories. Therefore, users have a lot of difficulty in accessing the required information and plan their holidays with what they find on the web. This problem is caused by the absence of widely adopted methodological and technological standards in the tourism industry, and the lack of a universal standard vocabulary. The solution requires standardisation of business models, processes and knowledge architectures. There is a need to develop systems that allows a user/client to find appropriate information so that they can plan their tours and vacations with SMTEs in the loop. This can be achieved by using intelligent systems, and ontology can be used as the core of intelligent systems. This paper discusses the purpose of developing tourism ontology, and its application in developing intelligent tourism information systems. First, we present an overview of concepts underpinning ontology and the processes used for its development. Next, we explore how intelligent ICTs are being applied to tourism business across the globe. Finally, we articulate possibilities for further enhancements, and present our conclusions. Ontology Fundamentals Ontology is an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest, and the relationships held among them. The ontology is developed to LEADING-EDGE DEVELOPMENTS IN TOURISM ICT AND 3 provide a clear definition of each term used in a domain. A further description of how to instantiate each term can then be included in the ontological framework, along with examples. This ontology identifies key concepts and related important terms in the context; thus, automatically building a thesaurus. Ontology can be edited and refined as needed, allowing insertions of new themes, new relations and new terms. We can classify ontologies as domain ontology and theory ontology (Swartout, Patil, Knight & Russ 1997). Domain ontology provides a set of terms for describing some domain, such as medicine or computer maintenance; where as theory ontologies provide a set of concepts for representing some aspect of the world, such as time, space etc. Tourism ontology is a domain ontology, which will describe the terms in the domain of tourism and the relationships between them. Figure 1 shows the overall process of developing and using ontology. A domain specific ontology is developed with the help of ontology development languages and tools. This ontology is then used for developing intelligent systems for that domain. Intelligent tourism information system is the domain for tourism ontology. Often ontology is developed to: • Share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents; • Enable reuse of domain knowledge; • Make domain assumptions explicit; and • Analyse domain knowledge. Figure 1: Ontology as the core of intelligent systems Development of ontology Several ontology development editors have been created in the last few years. A comparison of all three tools that can be used for ontology development is given by Jakkilinki, Sharda and Georgievski (2004). In this section, we describe Protégé 2000, which is the preferred ontology editor. Methodology and tools for developing tourism ontology The methodology we follow is very much similar to the one proposed by Uschold and King (1995). Nonetheless, we are also guided by the other methodologies. Figure 2 presents an overview of the methodology followed for developing tourism ontology. The steps in this methodology include: identifying the purpose, ontology capture, coding, refinement, testing and maintenance. Each of these steps are described in some detail in the following. Ontology development languages and tools e.g. Protégé 2000