A Semantic Brokering System for the Tourism Domain

G. Antoniou, T. Skylogiannis, A. Bikakis, N. Bassiliades, “A Semantic Brokering System for the Tourism Domain”, Journal of Information Technology and Tourism, special issue on "Semantic Web Technologies and Applications", Vol. 7, No. 3-4, pp. 183-200, 2005.

The tourism industry is a good candidate for taking up Semantic Web technology. In this paper we study the brokering and matchmaking problem in the tourism domain, that is, how a requester’s requirements and preferences can be matched against a set of offerings collected by a broker. The proposed solution uses the Semantic Web standard of RDF to represent the offerings, and a deductive logical language for expressing the requirements and preferences. We motivate and explain the approach we propose, and report on a prototypical implementation exhibiting the described functionality in a multi-agent environment.