Authors
Jan Blanchard*
Tourist Republic
John G. Breslin
DERI, NUI Galway
Abstract
A commonly-highlighted problem encountered when performing relatively straightforward tasks on the Web is the repetition of information required and the lack of understanding that exists between various systems, especially in the travel domain. For example, if one is organising a trip, the full details of a person's trip are distributed across various disconnected sites, and some manual means of gathering this information is usually required. A number of technologies are beginning to converge which can provide viable solutions to such problems. The first is online social networking and social media sites that allow a user to create and maintain an online network of close friends or business associates, obtaining recommendations from peers for social and professional reasons. The second technology of interest is the Semantic Web, which provides a means of both linking identifiable things together and of describing the meaning of these links. In the travel domain, resources can be connected by links describing the type of relationships involved. In this presentation, we will describe work being undertaken by Tourist Republic and DERI, building on the partner’s existing TouristR destination review platform and semantic social software expertise, to create a semantic recommender network for trip planning (called TripPlanr).
