A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research

This paper reviews the published articles on eTourism in the past 20 years. Using a wide variety of sources, mainly in the tourism literature, this paper comprehensively reviews and analyzes prior studies in the context of Internet applications to Tourism. The paper also projects future developments in eTourism and demonstrates critical changes that will influence the tourism industry structure. A major contribution of this paper is its overview of the research and development efforts that have been endeavoured in the field, and the challenges that tourism researchers are, and will be, facing

A Software Product Line Approach to Ontology-based Recommendations in E-Tourism Systems

This study tackles two concerns of developers of Tourism Information Systems (TIS). First is the need for more dependable recommendation services due to the intangible nature of the tourism product where it is impossible for customers to physically evaluate the services on offer prior to practical experience. Second is the need to manage dynamic user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the semantic web and mobile computing such that etourism systems (TIS) can evolve proactively with emerging user needs at minimal time and development cost without performance tradeoffs. However, TIS have very predictable characteristics and are functionally identical in most cases with minimal variations which make them attractive for software product line development. The Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) paradigm enables the strategic and systematic reuse of common core assets in the development of a family of software products that share some degree of commonality in order to realise a significant improvement in the cost and time of development. Hence, this thesis introduces a novel and systematic approach, called Product Line for Ontology-based Tourism Recommendation (PLONTOREC), a special approach focusing on the creation of variants of TIS products within a product line. PLONTOREC tackles the aforementioned problems in an engineering-like way by hybridizing concepts from ontology engineering and software product line engineering. The approach is a systematic process model consisting of product line management, ontology engineering, domain engineering, and application engineering. The unique feature of PLONTOREC is that it allows common TIS product requirements to be defined, commonalities and differences of content in TIS product variants to be planned and limited in advance using a conceptual model, and variant TIS products to be created according to a construction specification. We demonstrated the novelty in this approach using a case study of product line development of e-tourism systems for three countries in the West-African Region of Africa

A Study on the Construction of Tourism E-commerce System Based on Semantic Web Services

This paper presents a novel method of constructing a tourism e-commerce platform based on semantic web services. In order to solve the puzzles of web services discovery, system adaptability, automatically assembling and calling caused by bad system semantic interoperability in tourism e-commerce based on traditional web services, we construct a novel tourism e-commerce system framework based on semantic web services, which uses semantic services layer to replace the representation layer in the traditional model. Experiment proves that the framework owns the superiority of platform irrelevance, system highly seamless integration, high semantic interoperability and intelligence, and can solve the low semantics in tourism e-business system well

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse