Semantic Platform for the Composition of Tourism Products and Services

In order to be competitive, tourism intermediaries (i.e. travel agents, tour operators, etc.) require flexible and customizable solutions to adapt the wide variety of products and services on demand according to customers´ preferences. In addition, tourism intermediaries need to provide added value to customers by mapping their preferences or wishes into a composition of specific market products and services offered by different suppliers, e.g. hotel supplier plus car rental service supplier plus flight supplier plus attraction supplier. This paper presents a platform where the combination of ontologies and semantic Web services (SWS) allows tourism intermediaries to seamlessly offer customized and diversified services and products that can rapidly satisfy market and end-users´ demands. This platform includes an infrastructure to register, catalogue and discover services; a graphical tool for the composition of services; middleware to deploy and execute the composed services, and a Web 2.0-oriented interface generator.