Towards ubiquitous tourist service coordination and integration: A multi-agent and semantic web approach

With the recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for ubiquitous access to tourist information systems for service coordination and integration. However, disparate tourist information and service resources make it particularly difficult for mobile tourists to use them effectively during their trips. Neither can current tourist portals assist tourists proactively or adequately to overcome this problem. Motivated by the emerging technologies of multi-agent information systems (MAIS) that can effectively assist mobile users together with Semantic Web that can effectively organize information and service resources, we propose a ubiquitous tourist assistance system (UTAS) be built upon these technologies. In this paper, we formulate a scalable, flexible, and intelligent MAIS infrastructure for a proactive UTAS with agent clusters based on a case study of a large service-oriented travel agency. Each agent cluster comprises several types of agents to achieve the goals of the major processes of a tourist's trip. We show how agents can make use of ontology from the Semantic Web to plan better as well as help tourists better understand and specify their requirements and preferences. We discuss and evaluate our approach from different stakeholders' perspective.