Section: Application Domains

Tourism

As tourism is a highly competitive domain, local tourism authorities have developed Web sites in order to offer of services to tourists. Unfortunately, the way information is organised does not necessarily meet Internet users expectations and numerous improvements are necessary to enhance their understanding of visited sites. Thus, even if only for economical reasons, the quality and the diversity of tourism packages have to be improved, for example by highlighting cultural heritage.

Again to illustrate our role in such a domain, Let us cite some past projects where AxIS is involved related mainly to Semantic Web Mining  (By Semantic Web Mining, we mean the mutual benefits between two communities Semantic Web and Web Mining). In our case, a) we exploit ontologies and semantic data for improving usage analysis, personalised services, the quality of results of search engines and for checking the content of an IS and also b) we exploit usage data for updating ontologies.) and Information Retrieval.

• Research has been carried out using log files from the city of Metz. This city was chosen because its Web site is in constant development and has been awarded several times, notably in 2003, 2004 and 2005 in the context of the Internet City label. The objective was to extract information about tourists behaviours from this site log files and to identify possible benefits in designing or updating a tourism ontology.

• Providing Tourism Information linked to Transportation information: AxIS has already studied recommender systems in order to provide users with personalised transportation information while looking for tourism information such as cultural information, leisure etc. (cf. our recommender Be-TRIP (2006) based on CBR*Tools).

• In the context of HOTEL-REF-PACA project, we aimed to better refer the web sites of hotels/campings from the region of TOURVAL in PACA (mainly Vésubie territory), with an approach based on a better understanding of usage from the internauts. To address this, we proposed and adopted a multidisciplinary approach combining various AxIS know-how: knowledge engineering (ontology in tourism), data mining (analysis of Google logs, hotel web site logs and user queries, visual behaviours from eye tracker), Ergonomics (clustering of hotel web sites based on their ergonomical quality).

• Several contacts (PACA, France Living Labs, Island of the Reunion) have been done related to projects in tourism and eco-tourism.