A performance comparison between data-based KMS and ontology based KMS for e-Tourism Services

There is an increasing trend in use of Knowledge Management System (KMS) by organizations specially those in the service sector. Knowledge Management (KM) has been recognized as one of the essential strategic tools that lead to continuous performance improvement of organizations. Organizations providing services to customers have to respond to several, numerous, overlapping, client problems promptly with relevant solutions. There may be several KMS models for an organization to choose from like keyword based, ontology based or CBR based depending upon the application domain and the users of the system. The proposed KMS is for an organization that provides e-Tourism Services has two versions, data-based and ontology based. A performance comparison between the two versions show that ontology based KMS has much better performance that the data-based version. Hence an Ontology-based KMS is a possible suitable framework of Knowledge Management to enhance performance of service organizations.