Section: Application Domains

Tourism

Local tourism authorities have developed Web sites in order to promote tourism and to offer services to citizens. Unfortunately the way information is organized does not necessarily meet Internet users  expectations. Mechanisms are necessary to enhance their understanding of visited sites. Tourism is a highly competitive domain. If only for economical reasons, the quality and the diversity of tourism packages have to be improved, for example by highlighting the cultural heritages.

AxIS is involved in the RNTL Eiffel project (cf. section  7.1.3 ) whose goal is to provide users with an intelligent and multilingual semantic search engine dedicated to the tourism domain. This should allow tourism operators and local territories to highlight their resources; customers could then use a specialised research tool to organize their trip on the basis of contextualised, specialised, organised and filtered information.

Other researches (cf. sections  6.4.6 , 6.5.4 ) and 6.5.5 have been carried out using log files from the city of Metz. This city was chosen because their Web site keeps developing and has been rewarded several times, notably in 2003, 2004 and 2005 in the context of the  Internet City @@@@  label.

The objective was to extract information about tourists' behaviours from this site log files and to evaluate what could be the benefice in designing or updating a tourism ontology (cf. section  6.4.6 ).

AxIS is also interested in providing users whith transport information while looking for tourism information such as cultural information, leisure etc.