Ontology-based Approach to Intelligent Ubiquitous Tourist Information System

This paper presents an ontology-based approach to an intelligent ubiquitous tourist information system. With the recent advances in Internet and ubiquitous technologies, there is increasing use of intelligent tourist information services via the web and mobile systems. Recently, those services have provided integrated heterogeneous travel information, recommended tourist attractions tailored to user profiles and travelers´ preferences, as well as services for pedestrian travelers using mobile systems. In parallel to these developments, many studies on the ontological approach to intelligent tourist information services have been introduced. However, there have been only a few studies undertaken from the perspective of both tour services and travelers´ preferences using ontology. Thus, in this paper, we propose a tourist domain ontology that consists of concepts for tourist contents and locations, and a tour service application ontology for various intelligent tour services. In addition, according to those ontologies, we designed an Ontology-based Intelligent Ubiquitous Tourist Information System (OiUTIS) for an interactive tourist information service tailored to both tour services and travelers in ubiquitous environments.