Itiner@: Ontology for Personalizing Tourist Routes in Mobile Devices

Several applications that support users when doing tourism have appeared during the last years. These applications, though popular, have not become a reliable and dependable tourist assistant because they offer little personalization, which eventually may overwhelm users with too much information. An effective mobile application should store tourist information in a way that facilitates the identification of relevant points of interest to the user and the relevant information about them. The relevance of information depends also on the context. This paper presents an ontology that can store information about points of interest (POI), preferences and habits of users and time information. The presented ontology is aligned with the ontology Linked Geo Data to facilitate the importation of data to and from it. The ontology has been integrated into a mobile application called Itiner@ to create custom routes for each user based on his/her preferences, personal situation, means of transport, area to visit, date and duration of the visit. The main contribution of this work is to identify the relevant information to mobile touristic applications and to show how to use an ontology to improve the functionalities of geographic information system through the use of semantic information.