Exploiting tourism destinations' knowledge in an RDF-based P2P network

Destination Management Systems (DMS) is a perfect application area for Semantic Web and P2P technologies since tourism information dissemination and exchange are the key-backbones of tourism destination management. DMS should take advantage of P2P technologies and semantic web services, interoperability, ontologies and semantic annotation. RDF-based P2P networks allow complex and extendable descriptions of resources instead of fixed and limited ones, and they provide query facilities against these metadata instead of simple keyword-based searches. The layered adaptive semantic-based DMS (LA_DMS) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) project aims at providing semantic-based tourism destination information by combining the P2P paradigm with Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we propose a metadata model encoding semantic tourism destination information in an RDF-based P2P network architecture. The model combines ontological structures with information for tourism destinations and peers. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.