An Architecture for Ontology Based Tourism Knowledge System

摘要

Tourism is a leading application field of advanced Information Technology as the consequence of its features: a rapidly developing economic category dependent upon high-tech administration, a cross-sectoral industry based on immediate communication and close collaboration, excessive and heterogeneous information with frequent update. Meanwhile, how to make correct development strategy in time, how to cooperate in harmony to provide tourists bundling services, and how to insure the timeliness, accuracy and pertinence of disseminated information have been great challenges to IT communities. There have been many projects, such as IFITT, FETISH, GUIDE, DieToRecs, Yahtour, which commit to explore new techniques to adapt to and accelerate the development of travel and tourism industry. One of the main problems, we think, that hinder this progress is the contradiction between the absent of semantics for the information in existing systems and on the Web and the need of semantics of data and information by intelligent tourism infrastructure for information retrieval, decision making, distributed management, and cross-sectoral cooperation. This paper suggests an ontology based methodology for conceptual modeling in the tourism domain in support of these missions.