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Towards ubiquitous tourist service coordination and process integration: A collaborative travel agent system architecture with semantic web services

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Abstract

With the recent advances in Internet and mobile technologies, there are increasing demands for ubiquitous access to tourist information systems for service coordination and process integration. However, due to disparate tourist information and service resources such as airlines, hotels, tour operators, it is still difficult for tourists to use them effectively during their trips or even in the planning stage. Neither can current tourist portals assist tourists proactively. To overcome this problem, we propose a Collaborative Travel Agent System (CTAS) based on a scalable, flexible, and intelligent Multi-Agent Information System (MAIS) architecture for proactive aids to Internet and mobile users. We also employ Semantic Web technologies for effective organization of information resources and service processes. We formulate our MAIS architecture for CTAS further with agent clusters based on a case study of a large service-oriented travel agency. Agent clusters may comprise several types of agents to achieve the goals involved in the major processes of a tourist’s trip. We show how agents can make use of ontology from the Semantic Web to help tourists better plan, understand, and specify their requirements collaboratively with the CTAS. We further illustrate how this can be successfully implemented with Web service technologies to integrate disparate Internet tourist resources. To conclude, we discuss and evaluate our approach from different stakeholders’ perspectives.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSFC Grants of China (60473091 and 60673175).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dickson Computer Systems, 7, Victory Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Dickson K. W. Chiu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clean Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Yves T. F. Yueh

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong

    Ho-fung Leung

  4. Faculty of Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

    Patrick C. K. Hung

Authors
  1. Dickson K. W. Chiu
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  2. Yves T. F. Yueh
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  3. Ho-fung Leung
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  4. Patrick C. K. Hung
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dickson K. W. Chiu.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper has been presented at the IEEE 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (Yueh et al. 2007).

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Chiu, D.K.W., Yueh, Y.T.F., Leung, Hf. et al. Towards ubiquitous tourist service coordination and process integration: A collaborative travel agent system architecture with semantic web services. Inf Syst Front 11, 241–256 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-008-9087-2

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