Automating Information Aggregation Processes in Information Centres

As tourism is an information business, tourists have to rely on the information available beforehand. One – prominent – source of information are call centres of national or regional tourism organisations, which provide users expert advise and also pre-compiled information documents and brochures. However, such requests are usually answered with on demand off and on-line searches, communicating the required information to the customer via telephone. This is a cumbersome and often low quality process. The project OnTourism aims at improving these processes by automatically extracting (publicly) available information about the requested topics and compiling them into comprehensible documents which can then be sent to the customers. The information access for the call centre’s personnel is supported by semantic annotation of the available documents, thus improving the required time to answer customers’ requests as well as the service quality.