Covering the semantic space of tourism: an approach based on modularized ontologies

Personalized online tourism services play a crucial role for tourists. In order to deliver adequate information, a semantic matching between tourism services and user context is needed. In the phase of trip planning, the essential user context comprises primarily user preferences and interests, while during the trip location and time context are added. While being on the move, unexpected events might force tourists to completely reschedule their travel plan and look for alternatives. In order to facilitate semantic matching between alternative touristic sites and user context, a specific vocabulary for the tourism domain, user type, time and location is needed. We demonstrate in this paper that existing tourism ontologies can hardly fulfill this goal as they mainly focus on domain concepts. The goal of this paper is to provide an alternative approach for covering the semantic space of tourism through the integration of modularized ontologies, such as user, W3C Time or W3C Geo, that center around a core domain ontology for the tourism sector.