Tourism Ontology and Semantic Management System: State-of-the-arts Analysis

The global importance of tourism is steadily rising,creating new job opportunities in many countries. Today’s information management solutions for the complex tasks of tourism intermediaries are still at an early stage from a semantic point of view. This paper presents some preliminary results of OnTourism Project. OnTourism is aimed at (1) applying, concretizing and evaluating Semantic Web technologies such as ontologies, semantic annotation of content, and semantic search to the information-rich and economically important tourism domain, (2) identifying, developing and integrating reference ontologies for the tourism industry, and (3) showing the proof-of-concept in a real-world scenario of the Austrian tourism industry. First results presented in this paper identify publicly available tourism ontologies and existing freely available ontology management tools for the tourism domain. We identify seven tourism ontologies which are suitable as a basis for creating problem-specific ontologies. Furthermore we review and evaluate five freely available ontology management tools that are suited for application in the tourism domain.