Ontology-Driven Tour-Planning Systems: A Conceptual Framework

This paper presents a two-level conceptual framework and a two-level ontology-mapping approach for ontology-driven on-line tour planning. The conceptual framework includes an abstract level and a representation level. The abstract level identifies two types of participants (a traveler and travel information providers), two types of information (internal and external information), and two types of processes (implicit and explicit process). Subsequently, at the representation level, the two types of participants are represented as two types of agents, the Internet agent for the traveler and the Internet agent for the travel-information providers, along with information and processes associated with them through an agent-based design. Corresponding to the two types of participants, two ontologies (ontology for the traveler and ontology for the travel-information providers) are used to represent their perspectives. The two ontologies are mapped at two levels: conceptual mapping and property-value match. Conceptual mapping uses formal concept analysis to identify equivalent or overlapping concepts between the two ontologies. Subsequently, the property values of mapped concepts are evaluated in order to create a tour plan that matches a traveler's preferences with the information provided at tourism websites. A hypothetical case study is used to illustrate the conceptual framework and ontology-mapping approach.