OnTourism Ontology-based Online Tourism Offer Integration Ying Ding

Project Data Duration of the project: 21 Months Starting date: 1 st of August, 2006 Total Budget: EURO for the whole project Members –Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck (UIBK DERI) –Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems (TU Vienna ISIS) –eCommerce Competence Center (ec3) –austria.info systems GmbH (AIS) –Lixto Software GmbH

Objectives Improve information creation, maintenance and delivery in the tourism industry by introducing semantic technologies to this domain Apply, concretize and evaluate semantic technologies to a specific, information-rich and economically very important domain Identify, develop and integrate reference ontologies for the tourism industry using ontology engineering methods Show the proof-of-concept in a real-world scenario of the Austrian tourism industry.

Main workpackages WP1: Use Case and Evaluation WP2: Ontology Management WP3: Semantic Content Management Processes WP4: Content Classification and Annotation WP5: Tourism Meta Portal WP6: Project Management

Expected results OnTourism is aimed at reducing and solving problems regarding current content creation, maintenance and delivery processes in the tourism industry and, therefore, opening-up new ways of handling, delivering and using tourist information. The focus is on the exploration of semantic technology for replacement of the current, only partly electronic mode of information management. In view of the 25 or so target-market sub-portals run by Österreich Werbung, the continuous distribution of market- specific content to any of these sub-portals is expected heavily benefit from semantically-enhanced indexing methods.