Semantic web E-portal for tourism

The purpose of the Semantic web is to make such information which is solely understandable by human´s machine process-able. In this paper, we present a semantic web application that holds hotel related information in its knowledge base and a natural language querying platform that takes in user queries and fetches the relevant results from the knowledge base. Ontology, which is the heart of semantic web, with concept instantiations serves as a domain knowledge base and SPARQL Protocol and RDF Querying Language is used as the channel that accomplishes the retrieval of that information A simple user experiment shows that the system is time effective and helpful in making decisions with minimum queries as compared to browsing even with selected sites. We also present a comparative study of our system with regular search engines, and the differences in their operation.