SEAWISE: A Framework for Web Based Intelligent Integration of Sea Transport and Personal Mobile Trip Guide Services

Maritime transportation market relies on a diverse set of stakeholders and it is strongly affected by their cultural and sectoral diversity. The plethora of existing telematic information services suffer from inflexibility in the sense of restricting the types of business models they allow. Thus the providers of such services are forced to assume predefined business models and processes that are fixed and thus inflexible. The paper discusses a framework, which enables the intelligent integration of sea transport services exploiting the release of web services and the dynamic exchange of data offered by peer to peer communication models. The framework provides flexibility and better process integration, since it allows the open communication of different service providers in the maritime sector. A specific application based on the proposed framework; namely the Personal Traveller Mobile Assistant (PTMA) is also presented. PTMA application is built upon the proposed framework, by aggregating content from tourism information sites, meteo, content and computerised reservation systems,.