Integration of Heterogeneous Information Sources

The description of tourism products and services can be characterized by heterogeneity. Suppliers use — in most of the cases — very different concepts and vocabularies to describe their products and services. Even within a specific domain such as hospitality, varying terms as well as structures refer to the same concepts. Obviously, this represents a barrier to automated communication on the WWW. In the following, we present a solution to that problem. It is based on a mediated architecture assuring interoperability on a tourism market — without forcing individual suppliers to agree on a common standard data model. It is shown how semantic modeling — using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) — provides new possibilities for unifying distributed heterogeneous data models.