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TOURISM INFORMATION AGGREGATION USING ANONTOLOGY APPROACH
Miguel Gouveia, Jorge Cardoso
 Department of Mathematics and Engineering,Universaty of Madeira, Tecnopolo, Funchal, Madeiramiguelbgouveia@hotmail.com, ,jcardoso@uma.pt 
Keywords: Information Aggregation, Data Integration,Tourism Information, Dynamic Package, Ontology and SemanticWeb.Abstract: Aggregating related information, from different data sources, allows the creation of data repositories withvery useful information. In the tourism domain, aggregating tourism products with related tourismattractions will add value to those products. The ability to create dynamic packages is another reason toaggregate tourism information. Defining an ontology, that defines the concepts to aggregate, is the first stepto create tourism integration system. In this paper we define the approach and the architecture that guides tothe creation of aggregated solutions that provide valued tourism information.
1 INTRODUCTION
The Web became a large repository where one canget information of all kinds. Some enterprisesembrace this opportunity and create large datarepositories with data from web data sources.Combining all this data with data from proprietarysystems, it is possible to get data repositories withvery important information. Enterprises likeChoicePoint, Experian, LexisNexis or Acxiom aresome examples. They sell aggregated data that canhelp other enterprises to manage their business.Information aggregation like costumer preferences,product prices and market tendencies can helpenterprises manage the risk and reward of commercial and financial decisions. Having thisaggregated information, enterprises can decidewhich products they should sell and how thoseproducts should be sell. For example, if we want tosell books and have the information that thecostumers that buy movies also buy books related tothem, then we should associate to the book sellingthe selling of movies. This solution can have a reallypositive effect in the business because we are notonly selling books to the costumers that really wantto buy books but also to the costumers who arelooking for movies. This is only an example of howthis aggregated information has so much value.ChoicePoint, one of the top companies sellinginformation, sells to more than half of America’s top1000 companies [
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].In this paper, we describe how data aggregationcan be applied to the tourism domain in order toprovide valued information about tourism products.We also describe the approach and the architecturethat should be followed to create a system thatsupports aggregation of tourism information thatresides in different data sources. Finally, we describean example where the defined architecture can beused.
2 INFORMATIONAGGREGATION IN TOURISMDOMAIN
The idea of data aggregation can be applied tovast business areas, but we believe that it will alsohave a big success in the tourism industry. Thetourism domain is characterized by a significantheterogeneity market and information sources andby a high volume on online transactions [10].Nowadays, there are a lot of information about
 
 tourism products throughout the Internet and otherssystems. There are systems that offer informationabout a set of tourism products types like airlines,hotels and car rental. In this group of systems wehave the Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS)that are associated to a specific travel supplier andthe Global Distribution System (GDS) that is a superswitch connecting several CRSs [4]. From the HotelDistribution Systems (HDS) we can get informationabout hotels. There are also the DestinationManagement Systems (DMS) that provideinformation about tourist regions. Besides these setof systems, there are many web sites that offertourism information that aren’t assessable throughany of the enumerated systems. Web sites abouthotels that belong to small companies, car rental,golf or information about tourist regions are justsome examples. From the tourist point of view, theideal will be to get all the tourism information fromonly one place. The tourist wants to get tourisminformation of his interest with less possible “work”and as rapidly as possible. If the information isspread through a lot of systems and through a lot of web sites then this is not possible. Only aggregatingall the spread tourism data, we can offer to thetourist the ideal solution.From the tourism supplier point of view, theinformation aggregation can also bring a lot of advantages. Combining the tourism productsinformation with other information, it will add valueto his products, and therefore he will have morepossibilities of sell. Generally the tourist is notattracted to the tourism product but to the idea of tourism itself, the tourism product is just a need. Forexample, if a tourist wants to visit a specific city hehas to select an hotel to stay. Here the hotel is notthe attraction, the attraction is the city and themonuments or events that take place there. So,aggregating to the tourism products, informationabout tourism attractions, it is a very importantaction in order to sell the tourism products.One of the big challenges in the tourism businessis to provide the ability to create dynamic packages.Dynamic package means putting together, in realtime, a package of several major travel components,e.g., air flights legs, hotel nights, car rental days, etc[5]. These travel components, which can be calledtourism products, are obtained from heterogeneoussuppliers and heterogeneous information sources.This only can be done by aggregating all the tourismdata sources. Dynamic package technology providesto the tourist, flexibility to create the tourismpackage of his preference. For the suppliers, bringsthe possibility to sell their products aggregated toproducts from other companies. The aggregation of tourism products can add value to the products andcreate new opportunities of business.
3
 
SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY ININFORMATIONAGGREGATION
The process of information aggregation is noteasy. Currently Europe’s corporations spend over10 billion Euros in dealing with data integrationproblems [6]. Companies are spending 10% to 30%of their IT budgets on integrating applications andsystems internally and with their partners [7].The problem with information aggregation isthat the information is not structured in the samemanner. Each data source, or application, has adifferent data representation and provide differentdata formats for integration. HTML, XML, flat files,relational model are some of examples that we canfind in an aggregation problem. Another problem isthe semantic differences between data sources. Wecan find the same word with different meanings. Forexample, in one data source, costumer can refer tothe tourists in other can refer to the travel agencies.To resolve the information aggregation problem,many technologies where propose. Database andapplication server vendors offer comprehensive dataintegration tools and platforms. However, they donot provide any support for assuringsemanticcoherence and consistency of the results [6]. Onlyusing semantic technology and data mappingtechnologies it is possible to resolve the semanticincoherence.Using an ontology to integrate different datasources give us a set of advantages. Ontologies aimat capturing static domain knowledge in a genericway and provide a commonly agreed uponunderstanding of that domain [9]. Having all thedomain concepts well known it is easier to performthe integration. All the data to be integrated must bemapped to ontology items and then transformed in toontology instances. This way, we can add semanticmeaning to data. A unique meaning that can beshared by all the systems to integrate. All we need isto define the process of transformation. In most of the cases, the transformation process is based in pre-defined mapping rules between the data sourcesmetadata and the ontology. The mapping rules canbe created by the intervention of a human user, forthe more complex scenarios. Having all the datasources mapped to the ontology allows theutilization of all the technology associated to it.From an ontology we can query concepts, definebusiness rules or inferred new knowledge. But, themost important advantage is adding semanticmeaning to data in a formal way that allowsmachines to understand it.
 
 
4
 
ONTOLOGY BASEDAPPROACH
Information aggregation can remit us for twointegration approaches. We can start by selecting thedata sources to integrate and then try to create anontology based in the metadata from the datasources to integrate. In this approach we can followthe Semantic Information ManagementMethodology (SIM).
Figure 1: The Semantic Information ManagementMethodology.
 In SIM methodology first we collect themetadata of the existing data sources. Then, usingthis metadata, a central ontology is created capturingthe meaning of the data presented in these datasources. Finally, the disparate data schemas aremapped to the ontology, in order to give semantic tothe data residing in the various data sources.Another approach is thinking first in theinformation that we want to aggregate and create theontology in order to create a useful knowledge base.We call this the Ontology Based Approach. In thisapproach, the ontology is defined not based inexisting data sources metadata but, instead, based inthe solution that we want to build. The ontologymust be created in a way that represents all theconcepts that we pretend to aggregate. Who createsthe ontology must know very well the concepts ormust create the ontology based on expert’sinterviews. The idea of this approach is try to createan ontology, that is not specific to applications butrather represents a specific domain. Data sources aregenerally created for specific applications. Theontology must be an accurate model of the domain,only this way can it be reused in the integration of different data models [6].In the Ontology Based Approach, we begin withthe ontology definition. Based in the definedontology we create the data schema that will be usedto integrate all the data sources. Then, the dataschema for integration is mapped to the Ontology.Finally, we must search data sources that provide theinstances to populate the ontology. Using the systemor the integration of new data sources can bring newknowledge about the aggregated concepts that canresult in changes in the ontology. When the ontologyis changed all the process must be followed.
DefineOntologyCreate DataSchemaIntegrationMapping DataSchema withOntologySearch andAdd DataSources to theSystemUtilize
 
Figure 2: Ontology Based approach.
 
5
 
TOURISM INFORMATIONAGGREGATIONARCHITECTURE
In this section we describe our architecture for theaggregation of information from different datasources in the tourism domain. The goal of thearchitecture is to provide a framework that allowsthe aggregation of tourism information following theOntology Based Approach. The framework mustaccess tourism data sources, extract theirinformation, combine the data from the differentsources and present it to the tourist in an aggregatedform.
5.1 Semantic Layer
To explain all the components of the architecture,we are going to start by the upper layer, the semanticlayer. One of the most important components of thearchitecture is the ontology. It is in the ontologywhere we define all the concepts to integrate. Eachconcept will be composed by properties, relationswith other concepts and restrictions. Having theontology defined, all the data to integrate mustrespect de definitions and rules of the ontology.Associated to the ontology is an inference enginethat allows to infer new knowledge from theontology. The inferred knowledge will help in theprocess of querying information or in the process of validate the information. In this architecture we usethe OWL language [12] to define the ontology.OWL is the W3C recommendation language for thedefinition of ontologies.The access to the semantic data, stored in theontology, is managed by the Data Access Controlmodule. It is through this module that user interfaceapplications can be added to the architecture.Therefore, it provides a set of Web Services thatallow obtain information through a set of definedoptions.
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