An Ontology-based Hotel Search System Using Semantic Web Technologies

Currently, hotel search engines may help travelers find hotels, but the returned set of information is usually not satisfactory to them. It is because the engines do not understand what travelers want exactly and cannot deal with the travelers' interest which is expressed in various terms, even including some ambiguous ones. The objective of this research is to build hotel ontology using currently available semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL and SWRL and to show how it can be used to help travelers find hotels of their interest. To that end, we analyzed available hotel-related ontologies and investigated typical terms which are used when searching for hotels in the Q&A communities. Based on the results of the analysis and investigation, we designed hotel domain ontology which consists of Objective Concepts Ontology(OCO), Universal Concepts Ontology(UCO), and Evaluation Concepts Ontology(ECO). To demonstrate the use of the ontology for a hotel search, we developed a Semantic Hotel Search System (SHSS).