Integrating open data and generating travel itinerary in semantic-aware tourist information system

The growth of online data and services on the Web make it become more and more emerging as an indispensable tool of traveling for the tourist industry. It is not denied that various approaches bring benefits for visitors in supporting them of searching tourist attractions, such us interested places for the visit, eating or staying. However, like a coin has two sides, too much information would be the difficulty for people when planning their journeys. Generally, tourists usually have problems when finding a satisfied accommodation without a reference to nearby restaurants, sights or event locations. In addition, travelers suffer from the information overload when they look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing the relevant and up-to-date information for the tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for the tourist guide information systems. This paper presents a semantic web approach for developing STAAR (Semantic Tourist informAtion Access and Recommending) which is a system that addresses the above mentioned issues. Specifically, it is described how an ontology is designed to represent the travel related information, and to support the integrating data from the open repositories. Relying on this ontology, we propose an algorithm for generating travel itinerary on the Web which is relevant to both criterions of the itinerary length and user interest.