Designing an Information Gathering Application for a Personalized Travel Recommender System

Obtaining information which is both trustworthy and relevant to the user is crucial for the success of the Travel Recommender Systems. Such a system should automatically obtain high quality facts and knowledge about the touristic attractions, filter them and present the user only those pieces which are of interest for him. To this end, a challenging issue is to select among the existing technologies those able to be articulated into a system which could fulfill the mentioned task. The system we propose has a pragmatic approach of the problem, aiming to identify the instruments to be used in touristic information gathering, if integrated in such a system. The system is built around a map system and a general purpose ontology and makes use of parsing techniques in order to retrieve additional information from web sources via a search engine. The proposed architecture is also expandable and other technologies can be linked to improve the variety of results.