An Ontology Based Approach to Data Representation and Information Search in Smart Tourist Guide System

Tourism is travel for leisure and recreational purposes. However, travelers suffer from information overload when they use the Internet to look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing the relevant information to tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for tourist guide information systems. This paper presents an ontology based approach for developing STAAR (Semantic Tourist information Access and Recommending), a system that addresses this problem. STAAR help tourist search information by providing a various semantic search feature in a mobile phone application. In addition, we propose an algorithm for recommending travel route relevant to both criterions: itinerary length and user interest.