Hotel search engine with semantic web technologies

Abstract

Semantic web is the next generation of World Wide Web. In the Semantic Web, background knowledge about the meaning of web resources can be stored in a machine-processable and interpretable way. Services for finding, integrating, or connecting information may be based on these semantic descriptions. Tourism is considered an information intensive industry. Information changes quickly in tourism industry and the World Wide Web has significantly influenced the way of information gathering and exchanging. However, in current information systems, most work is left to the user who has to consider several sources of information before taking decisions on travel planning. Also current information search mechanisms are based on key worlds not on concepts and these search results may confuse users at times. To address this problem more sophisticated search mechanisms are required. In this dissertation, I propose a hotel information search engine which uses semantic web technologies for an improved exploration of hotels for users in order to reduce their search time, effort and cost.