Case Base Querying for Travel Planning Recommendation

This paper describes the general architecture and function of an intelligent recommendation system aimed at supporting a leisure traveller in the task of selecting a tourist destination, bundling a set of products and composing a plan for the travel. The system enables the user to identify his own destination and to personalize the travel by aggregating elementary items (additional locations to visit, services and activities). Case-Based Reasoning techniques enable the user to browse a repository of past travels and make possible the ranking of the elementary items included in a recommendation when these are selected from a catalogue. The system integrates data and information originating from external, already existent, tourist portals exploiting an XML-based mediator architecture, data mapping techniques, similarity-based retrieval and online analytical processing.