Learning Semantic Web from E-Tourism

Inquiring an information system in natural language is engaging in the special tourism domain because users usually have very different backgrounds regarding their computer literacy. The constant fast growth in travel related information measure makes it increasingly difficult to find, organize, access and maintain the information required by consumers (users). The Semantic Web provides enhanced information access based on the exploitation of machine-processable meta-data. E-tourism is a perfect candidate for Semantic Web because it is information-based and depends on the World Wide Web, both as a means of marketing and transaction channel. E-tourism/e-travel software adapted from original e-commerce, ready for creating instantly online reservation/ booking. The Semantic Web relies heavily on the formal ontologies that structure underlying data for the purpose of comprehensive and transportable machine understanding. Therefore, the success of the Semantic Web depends strongly on the proliferation of ontologies. Ontologies can assist organization, browsing, parametric search, and in general, more intelligent access to online information and services. The ideas proposed in this paper, are particularly interested in the new possibilities afforded by Semantic Web technology in the area of knowledge management practical to the travel industry. This paper also discusses some ontological trends that support the growing domain of online tourism. The preview of e-tourism is introduced in general. The paper also gives the example concepts of existing e-tourism using ontologies display in graphical model presented in ontologies editor tool called Protege and show the example of e-tourism ontologies description in OWL and RDFS syntax. The last part of the paper is a summary on the e-tourism ontologies projects.