Ontology-based Online Tourism Offer Integration

Today’s information management concepts and solutions for the complex tasks of tourism intermediaries – such as regional agencies, national travel organisations (NTOs), supra-national aggregators, and commercial retailers – are still low-level from a semantic point of view. Hence, information creation, maintenance and delivery being the primary business process of tourism intermediaries faces heterogeneities in various dimensions, requires manual coordination tasks, and suffers from missing consensus on agreed concepts and technologies. OnTourism is aimed at (1) applying, concretizing and evaluating Semantic Web technologies such as ontologies, semantic annotation of content, and semantic search to this information-rich and economically quite important domain, (2) identifying, developing and integrating reference ontologies for the tourism industry, and (3) showing the proof-of-concept in a real-world scenario of the Austrian tourism industry. Based on a semantic content management approach as well as mediator and data extraction technologies developed in previous research projects such as Harmonise and Harmo-TEN, or utilising specialised data wrapping technologies such as liXto ®, OnTourism seeks to explore and expand the potential of advanced semantic technologies in a research domain of strong national interest, strength, and tradition.