An Ontology-based Approach for Personalized Itinerary Search

Personalization plays an important role in information retrieval systems. In the field of transportation, and more specifically multimodal transportation, personalization represents an efficient way for travelers to find appropriate routes. Providing travelers with the relevant information to their needs and preferences is challenging for transportation systems. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based approach for personalized itinerary search. Our proposal is based on modeling each user using an ontological fuzzy modular profile that incorporates a set of fuzzy modules representing several aspects of the user’s description. The approach is applied in the transportation domain and integrates a new method of matching between the profile ontology and the domain ontology to obtain personalized responses for individual user profiles. Our proposal was implemented and evaluated. Obtained results show that personalization coupled with ontology matching enables an improvement of query reformulation

Personalized City Tours - An Extension of the OGC OpenLocation Specification

A business trip to London last month , a day visit in Cologne next saturday and romantic weekend in Paris in autumn – this example exhibits one of the central characteristics of today’s tourism. People in the western hemisphere take much pleasure in frequent and repeated short term visits of cities. Every city visitor faces the general problems of where to go and what to see in the diverse microcosm of a metropolis. This thesis presents a framework for the generation of personalized city tours - as extension of the Open Location Specification of the Open Geospatial Consortium. It is founded on context-awareness and personalization while at the same time proposing a combined approach to allow for adaption to the user. This framework considers TimeGeography and its algorithmic implementations to be able to cope with spatio-temporal constraints of a city tour. Traveling salesmen problems - for which a heuristic approache is proposed – are subjacent to the tour generation. To meet the requirements of today’s distributed and heterogeneous computing environments, the tour framework comprises individual services that expose standard-compliant interfaces and allow for integration in service oriented architectures

Про деякі підходи до персоналізації щодо організації інтерфейсу користувача в автоматизованих системах

In modern automated systems, users are often facing the problem of information overload due to the ever increasing amounts of information to be processed in a short time. Working in these conditions affects the quality of users performing their functions in the system and the reliability of the systems themselves.In the article different existing approaches to solving this problem are described and analyzed, which are based on the idea of creating customized tools for users work with information. On the basis of these solutions a complex methodology of information representation and storage forms personalization is suggested, as well as software architecture based on it.In modern automated systems, users are often facing the problem of information overload due to the ever increasing amounts of information to be processed in a short time. Working in these conditions affects the quality of users performing their functions in the system and the reliability of the systems themselves.In the article different existing approaches to solving this problem are described and analyzed, which are based on the idea of creating customized tools for users work with information. On the basis of these solutions a complex methodology of information representation and storage forms personalization is suggested, as well as software architecture based on it

A Generalized Framework for Ontology-Based Information Retrieval Application to a public-transportation system

In this paper we present a generic framework for ontology-based information retrieval. We focus on the recognition of semantic information extracted from data sources and the mapping of this knowledge into ontology. In order to achieve more scalability, we propose an approach for semantic indexing based on entity retrieval model. In addition, we have used ontology of public transportation domain in order to validate these proposals. Finally, we evaluated our system using ontology mapping and real world data sources. Experiments show that our framework can provide meaningful search results

A Multi-Agent Approach for Provisioning of e-Services in u-Commerce Environments

Purpose: Taking into account the importance of e-commerce and the current applications of AI techniques in this area, this research aims to adequate the design of a multi-agent system for the provisioning of e-services in u-commerce environments. This proposal is centred on the methods of evaluation in a u-e-commerce environment. Design/methodology/approach: The multi-agent systems (MAS) approach is based on an MAS model developed for AmI that has been redesigned to support u-commerce. The use of a recommendation system, previously developed by the research group, is suggested for this MAS. The methodological proposal centres on the evaluation of this type of system. Findings: The evaluation of this type of system is the principal problem of current research. Therefore, this is the main contribution of the paper. Research limitations/implications: The different evaluation methods that are proposed, whether qualitative or quantitative, offer the possibility of measuring the added value that the context can give to the use of e-services in different domains of application. Qualitative evaluation should consider the customer as a central piece in the system. In addition, quantitative methods should objectively evaluate the contribution of context to the application. Practical implications: At present, there is no single method for evaluating the benefits of different u-commerce systems, so a new method needs to be found based on these techniques. Originality/value: The research proposes an MAS designed for u-commerce domains, analyzes the capacity of trust management techniques in this environment, and proposes several evaluation methods to show the benefits of context information in the use of e-services. Several real developments are described to show the different applications of MAS in u-commerce and how evaluation is carried out.This work has been partially supported by Projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM CONTEXT and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

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