Semantic approach to accommodation & booking related Web services

There are several types of information that tourists most often search for when planning a trip. Commonly, these are information about the location, travel, accommodation and nearby attractions. Almost all the knowledge that an average tourist needs already exists, but the current knowledge is highly decoupled and its aggregation is time consuming. Another problem with tourism-related Web services is that they do not correlate with each other. The information they share is often represented differently, is not connected and is sometimes even in contradiction. In this paper, we provide an overview of the differences in data representation between most popular Web tourist services, and introduce the A&B ontology that covers their data representation and enables the service discovery. Additionally, we propose a framework that is connected to the aforementioned Web services, translates the data to the A&B ontology, links the data and provides a single endpoint for multiple Web services.