An Ontology-based Multi-Agent System for the Accommodation Industry

Enterprise Application Integration remains a challenging field in IT, and this is particularly true for the online accommodation market where a large number of independently operated information systems exist. The mission to integrate those systems to create a common marketplace becomes a complicated problem due to the vast number of different data models and structures that currently exists within the accommodation domain. Existing technologies have given us some possible solutions but typically lack extensibility. To overcome those limitations, this paper proposes the utilisation of an ontology based multi-agent system that provides a highly efficient, flexible and easily maintainable platform for the online accommodation market that has the potential to support automation of the current business processes within the industry. This paper's contributions include: the utilisation of combining both semantic web technologies and Multi-Agent System (MAS) structure towards system integration in the accommodation online market; the use of a top level accommodation domain ontology based in-part on the OTA standard for facilitating agent communication and collaboration and the development of an ontology based data transformation mechanism for data structure translation. This paper also discusses future directions on the improvement of this OntologyBased Multi-agent system.