Design and Implementation of an Aggregation-based Tourism Web Information System

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a prototype web information system that uses web aggregation as the core engine. In this context, web aggregation is referred to as the process of integrating data extractable from various heterogenous web sources to meet certain new purposes. This prototype, referred to as MyTourism is developed by making use of Kapow Mashup Server which supports automated data extraction from web sources that can subsequently be stored either in the form of XML files or relational databases. MyTourism uses the tool to periodically extract data that are considered to be of interest to potential tourists, from selected Malaysian tourism websites. These extracted data are stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for use by a simple aggregator that was developed using ASP. NET and C# in order to provide the intended data integration for the target users. This paper also presents our naive technique to handle semantic conflicts among these extracted data and discusses the potential use of Semantic Web technologies for this purpose as part of our future works.