Designing an Ontology to Describe Ecological Cycling Routes within the Province of Tungurahua

Tourism, a significant industry worldwide, has allowed for economic, social, and cultural development in rural areas because of all the advantages it offers to tourists. Ecuador is a country that presents a wide range of alternatives in the tourist field allowing a massive tourist influx to many of its destinations such as indigenous communities, natural reserves, and tourist, ecological, and volcanic routes. Most importantly, Ecuador encourages the conservation of the diversity resulting from such influx. The objective of this research is to design an ontology which facilitates a description of the bicycle tourist routes in the province of Tungurahua, and specifically in the city of Ambato. Apart from route descriptions, this ontology gives information about the flora and fauna and places of interest such as inns, hotels, and restaurants that can be found along this route. This ontology was developed based on the application and enforcement of semantic web technologies. That being said, all the described information is attached to an RDF vocabulary and it can be accessed using SPARQL. Therefore, information that is semantically described in an organized and standardized manner is available in order to allow for interoperability with other existing data sources. As for the development of the ontology, the methodology used was an open code software known as “protégé”. The OWL (Ontology Web Language) was also used as marked language and RDFS for the description of the employed vocabulary

Enhancing Location-Based Social Media Network Services with Semantic Technologies: A Review

Today’s location-based social media services have gone beyond mere sharing users’real-time locationsvia internet, they now serve as the bridge between the real world and the online world. Location-based social media application can now recommend point of interest to users based on geographical information and user’s profile gatheredon social media networks. Semantic web technology provides tools,platforms and techniques to extract meaning, processand integrate structure datafrom the social web and other sources.The rapid increasein number of social media networks and theenormous amount of geographical and social data flow across mobile and web platforms, have not only provided rich data source for web applications but also help developers to facilitate location-based social media services. However, unprecedented amount of noise and unstructured data exist on these networks, making knowledge representation, point of interest recommendation and precision of search engine results cumbersome processes.In this paper, we presentreview of various semantic technologies that could bedeployed to enhance location-based social media services with emphasis on architectures, tools, supporting technologies and the pros and cons of each of these technologies

Portal de turismo orientado à Web semântica

Mestrado em Gestão da InformaçãoO presente trabalho propõe um portal de turismo destinado a apresentar aos seus utilizadores ideias e sugestões acerca de destinos e roteiros turísticos para viajar e conhecer. Inspirado na Web 2.0 são adicionados mecanismos colaborativos para que os utilizadores possam partilhar a sua opinião com a restante comunidade, incentivando a sua voz crítica. São analisadas, comparativamente, duas facções da Web Semântica - Uppercase e Lowercase - no sentido de saber qual a que poderá servir melhor os propósitos do sistema proposto. Verificou-se que a Web Semântica lowercase seria a mais indicada, e assim sendo, através dos microformatos foi demonstrada a sua implementação. Foi também iniciada a discussão acerca de um novo microformato relativo a roteiros turísticos: o itinerary. ABSTRACT: This paper will focus on a tourism web portal whose aim is to offer ideas and suggestions about tourist destinations and routes. Inspired on Web 2.0, collaborative mechanisms are used to allow users to share their opinion with the community, thus encouraging their critical voice. Two factions of the Semantic Web are analysed comparatively – Uppercase and lowercase – with the purpose of identifying which one fulfills the purposes of the proposed system best. lowercase semantic web was shown to be the ideal solution, and its implementation was demonstrated with the use of microformats. A discussion was also initiated regarding a new microformat for tourist routes: itinerary

Enhancing Hotel Search with Semantic Web Technologies

Tourism service providers are more and more under pressure to offer products of greater complexity and diversity to meet the ever-changing demands of travelers; the individualistic consumption patterns and lifestyles makes it increasingly difficult for tourist service providers to anticipate consumer behavior and configure their services accordingly, i.e. the tourist industry must focus more on a “hybrid consumer” whose travel choice will be more complex. Although current online travel systems aim to support the customer in finding a suitable hotel or even a whole trip, most of the work is still up to the customer, who has to consider several sources of information before deciding which hotel to book. Furthermore, since the quality of a hotel room w.r.t the requirements of the end-user are multi-dimensional and cannot be easily expressed on discrete scales, the main critical issue in such cases is a price/benefit ratio which is defined by what is known, as the “best” booking. To tackle these problems an advanced search technology that considers the ratio and ranks results accordingly to the user requirements is needed. In this paper we propose a framework which uses Semantic Web technologies for an improved exploration and rating of hotels for business customers in order to reduce the search time and costs, which, in turn, results in a huge benefit for the end-users. The framework provides methods for modeling domain specific expert knowledge and integration of diverse heterogeneous data sources. Semantic technologies enable business customer to formalize their requirements and to combine those requirements with aggregated hotel information like location or features, thus achieving a selection of the hotels ranked according to the customer\u27s requirements

DOI: 10.4067/S0718-18762008000100008 Enhancing Hotel Search with Semantic Web Technologies

Tourism service providers are more and more under pressure to offer products of greater complexity and diversity to meet the ever-changing demands of travelers; the individualistic consumption patterns and lifestyles makes it increasingly difficult for tourist service providers to anticipate consumer behavior and configure their services accordingly, i.e. the tourist industry must focus more on a “hybrid consumer ” whose travel choice will be more complex. Although current online travel systems aim to support the customer in finding a suitable hotel or even a whole trip, most of the work is still up to the customer, who has to consider several sources of information before deciding which hotel to book. Furthermore, since the quality of a hotel room w.r.t the requirements of the end-user are multi-dimensional and cannot be easily expressed on discrete scales, the main critical issue in such cases is a price/benefit ratio which is defined by what is known, as the “best ” booking. To tackle these problems an advanced search technology that considers the ratio and ranks results accordingly to the user requirements is needed. In this paper we propose a framework which uses Semantic Web technologies for an improved exploration and rating of hotels for business customers in order to reduce the search time and costs, which, in turn, results in a huge benefit for the end-users. The framework provides methods for modeling domain specific expert knowledge and integration of diverse heterogeneous data sources