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Semantic approach to travel information search and itinerary recommendation

Tuan‐Dung Cao (Department of Software Engineering, School of Information and Communication Technology, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam)
Quang‐Minh Nguyen (Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, School of Electronic Technology, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam)

International Journal of Web Information Systems

ISSN: 1744-0084

Article publication date: 24 August 2012

992

Abstract

Purpose

The growth of online data and services on the Web have have led to the Web become an indispensable tool for the tourist industry. It is not denied that various approaches bring benefits for visitors, in supporting their searching for tourist attractions, such as interesting places for the visit, eating or staying. However, like a coin has two sides, too much information would present a difficulty for people when planning their journeys. Generally, tourists usually have problems when trying to find satisfactory accommodation if references to nearby restaurants, sights or event locations are lacking. In addition, travelers suffer from the information overload when they look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing relevant and up‐to‐date information for the tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for the tourist guide information systems. The purpose of this paper is to propose a semantic approach for searching tourist information and generating travel itinerary.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper focus on introducing an ontological model for representation of tourist resources as well as traveler's profile. Based on this model, smart user interfaces facilitating the semantic search have been implemented in the mobile travel guide application. In addition, the authors propose an algorithm for generating travel itinerary which combines semantic matching with ant colony optimization technique.

Findings

The Semantic Tourist informAtion Access and Recommending (STAAR) system, which has been implemented to promote the travel activity in Hanoi, reveals the advantages of the semantic approach in the development of smart application with ontology‐based, user‐friendly interface and high precision information search features. An experiment was conducted to show that the proposed algorithm generates travel itinerary relevant to both criteria of itinerary length and user interest.

Originality/value

This paper presents a novel algorithm for planning a travel itinerary that is optimized on the length as well as semantically matching the user interests.

Keywords

Citation

Cao, T. and Nguyen, Q. (2012), "Semantic approach to travel information search and itinerary recommendation", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 256-277. https://doi.org/10.1108/17440081211258169

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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