Context-based semantic matchmaking to enhance tourists’ experiences

Tourists, preparing for a journey, suffer from information overload when they use the Internet to look for information about their next potential destination. Although approaches to support tourists in decision making exist (e.g., in form of recommendation systems), providing the right information for each type of tourist is still a challenging task. This is especially a major issue when tourists are already at a particular destination and desire to use their mobile devices to consume up-to-date travel-related information tailored to their current situation, i.e. context. This paper presents a context-based matchmaking approach that addresses the needs of tourists during their trip and aims to provide a more satisfying visit experience. In order to identify a set of tourism objects (e.g., attractions) that are most attractive for tourists, the CONCERT framework is presented exploits contextual information such as location and time as a filter to select relevant tourism objects. Within a second step, the matchmaking framework VMTO is introduced that acts on top of CONCERT and ranks the selected tourism objects according to personal tourist preferences.