www.sti-innsbruck.at© Copyright 2015 STI INNSBRUCK www.sti-innsbruck.at

TourPack: Packaging and Disseminating Touristic

Services with Linked Data and Semantics

Anna Fensel, Elias Kärle, Ioan Toma

anna.fensel@sti2.at, elias.kaerle@sti2.at, ioan.toma@sti2.at

1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies (IWOST),

Changchun, China,

11 March 2015

www.sti-innsbruck.at

Outine

• About TourPack

• Motivation

• Use Case Example

• Project Goals

• Technical Innovation

• Technical Details: Basing on schema.org & Regional Contents

• Further Expected Outcomes

• Background, Consortium and Extensions

• Contact and Follow us

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About

• TourPack builds a linked data -empowered system for touristic service

packaging.

• Integrating information from multiple sources and systems employing linked

data as a global information integration platform, and mining from the

depths of the “closed” data, the touristic service package production system

would cater to creating the most optimal travel experience for the traveler.

• Further, the service packages are to be efficiently published and made

bookable to the end consumers via intelligently selected most suitable

communication and booking channels: especially the ICT channels with

rapidly growing user audiences, such as the social media and the mobile

apps.

• Project duration: 1 July 2014 – 31 December 2016

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Motivation

The social media revolution has made this job for the organisations – as well as

for their customers when spending time on learning about service offers - much

more complicated, because:

• the number of channels has grown exponentially,

• the communication has changed from a mostly unilateral "push" mode (one

speaker, many listeners) to an increasingly fully bilateral communication,

where individual stakeholders (e.g. customers) expect one-to-one

communication with the organization, and the expected speed of reaction is

shrunk to almost real-time, and

• the contents of communication is becoming increasingly granular and more

dependent upon the identity of the receiver and the context of the

communication.

• Currently, there are more than 100 booking and 200 social media platforms

available on which the hotelier could be present.

• Utilizing the value of structured, linked, open and closed, big and small data.

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Use Case Example: Finding and Consuming the

Most Relevant Touristic Services on the Fly

A guest G enters the hotel for the first time. At the check-in desk the

receptionist introduces G to the newly launched smartphone app of the

hotel. G downloads the app in the free WiFi of the hotel and back in his/her

room he/she starts exploring the contents. In the "restaurants"-section of

the app she/he finds the menus of the day generated on the fly from linked

data of the available restaurants in the nearby, catering to the user’s food

preferences and dietary restrictions. Since she/he feels quite hungry

he/she makes a reservation for a certain preferred type of restaurant in the

area directly out of the app.

Illustration: Caroline Winklmair

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Project Goals

The major TourPack technical objectives are:

• design and implement a scalable online service packaging and

provisioning solution based on machine-processable semantics.

• deliver the technology for interacting with this multi-channel solution

through various and heterogeneous mobile channels.

• provide support in service packaging, such as accessing, interacting,

and value exchange (i.e., booking) of tourism services and their

combinations through this infrastructure, using linked data as a global

integration platform.

• validate and apply the TourPack research and development outcome in

pilots focusing on the booking of tourism services.

Overall aim: Being visible, scalable, and “on-demand” (vs. the current

manual labor and “one-size-fits-all” types of offers), when it comes to

touristic service offers marketing and booking

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Technical Innovation

We are to support automatic generation, clustering and

packaging of semantically annotated touristic service

offers from a variety of sources. More precisely, existing

information extraction, clustering and publishing is to be

adopted and extended in order to:

• obtain the extracted data in a Linked Data format,

(semi-)automatically associating metadata;

• generate service representations in Linked Data format

according to ontological models;

• interlink, cluster, package and provide services in an

automatic way;

• provide a semantic service and an online interface for

easy publishing and access to the above mentioned

functionalities.

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TourPack High Level Architecture

Mobile user

Social

media user

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Touristic Service Packaging on Social Media

• Generation and publishing of

posts suggesting other bookable

activities to do while traveling,

together with the hotel rooms

offer

• Published together with a direct

booking link

• Content adaptation for the social

media platform and language

Image credit: Werner Kräutler

www.sti-innsbruck.at

Regional Content Use

• Touristic associations and other sources have lots of regional

content helpful for generation of posts for hoteliers e.g. stories,

games, etc.

• That content is used to generate the posts

– in TourPack for Innsbruck and Salzburg

www.sti-innsbruck.at

We use Schema.org – what is it?

• Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies.

• Launched in June 2011 by Bing, Goolge and Yahoo

• Yandex joins in November

• Purpose:

Create a common set of schemas for webmasters to mark-up with structured data their websites.

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Web search on Web 1.0

• Question/Answer

– Until now….

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Web search on Web 2.0

• Now … Semantic Search

– (using the Knowledge graph)

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Web search on Web 3.0

• With accounts on Freebase, Wikipedia and social accounts

• And schema.org annotations in your web site …

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http://moz.com/ugc/i-became-an-entity-how-im-on-the-knowledge-graph

http://schema.org/Person

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Examples of annotated sites

• Examples of web sites annotated with Schema.org

• YELP (events, restaurants)

– http://www.yelp.com/

• Food.com (recipes)

– http://www.food.com/

• TVB Innsbruck (hotels, events)

– http://www.innsbruck.info/

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Examples of web sites annotated with

Schema.org

• YELP (events, restaurants)

– http://www.yelp.com/

• Food.com (recipes)

– http://www.food.com/

• Touristic association of Innsbruck (hotels, events)

– http://www.innsbruck.info

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Touristic association Innsbruck use case

• Started a collaboration in September of 2013 (STI & TVB Innsbruck)

• Strategies to enhance the visibility of their website and deal with the

multi-channel communication challenges.

– Semantic annotation in the website, blog

– Dissemination of content with Dacodi

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Schema.org for

Restaurant, Cafes, Bars & Pubs, Sightseeing

• Name

• Map

• PostalAddress

o streetAddress

o addressCountry

o postalCode

o addressLocality

o telephone

o faxNumber

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Object type: http://schema.org/RestaurantName: Café-Restaurant Villa BlankaAddress:

Object type: http://schema.org/PostalAddressStreet address: Weiherburggasse 8Address country: ATPostal code: 6020Address locality: InnsbruckTelephone: +43 512 27 60 70

Example of Café-Restaurant Villa Blanka

Fera

tel c

on

ten

t

Schema.org for

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Implementation of semantic annotation with a plugin (Feratel -> Typo3)

Schema.org for

www.sti-innsbruck.at

TVB Innsbruck: implementation

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http://blog.innsbruck.info/en/

http://www.innsbruck.info/en

www.sti-innsbruck.at 22

Schema.org for

www.sti-innsbruck.at

Expected Outcomes

Challenge Outcome

Multi-channel

communication

Semantic based representation of content (ontology) in intuitive and

familiar terminology for tourist service providers.

Scalable methods for separating and interweaving content and

communication channels, particularly, employing linked data as an

integration platform.

Online multi-channel communication technical solution.

Online interactions Formal communication pattern description mechanism as business

processes.

Reusable set of communication patterns to structure the online

interactions for the tourism domain.

Service integration

and yield

management

Integration of a booking engine with the necessary infrastructure for

tourism services to be directly bookable and configurable for yield

management and tailored to the preferences of the end consumers.

A technique for enablement touristic service providers to annotate their

offers employing linked data for the subsequent multi-platform reuse.

Mobile service

provisioning

Online mobile strategy definition for tourism organizations.

Mobile toolbox for the integration of booking services for travel service

providers.

Mobile framework and components for multi-channel and online

interactions management.

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Background

• Online Communications working group: http://oc.sti2.at

– Fensel, A., Toma, I., Garcia, J.-M., Stavrakantonakis, I., Fensel, D. "Enabling Customers

Engagement and Collaboration for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Ubiquitous Multi-

channel Ecosystems", Computers in Industry, Elsevier, 2014. ISSN: 0166-3615.

– Stavrakantonakis, I., Toma, I., Fensel, A., Fensel, D. “Bringing the Hotel Websites to their

Full Potential with Web 2.0 and 3.0: The Case of Austria”. In Proceedings of the 21th

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Travel and

Tourism (ENTER2014), pp. 665-677, 21-24 January 2014, Dublin, Ireland.

– Toma, I., Stanciu, C.-V., Fensel, A., Stavrakantonakis, I., Fensel, D. "Improving the online

visibility of touristic service providers by using semantic annotations". In Proceedings of the

11th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC'2014), 25-29 May 2014, Crete, Greece,

Springer-Verlag, LNCS (2014).

• Master thesis: Elias Kärle, Master thesis “An approach and implementation

for supporting multi-platform mobile service creation for businesses”,

January 2014, University of Innsbruck, Austria.

• See further, up-to-date publications at: http://oc.sti2.at/results/papers

www.sti-innsbruck.at

Consortium

www.sti-innsbruck.at

Extensions

• Start-up ONLIM – Online Communication and Marketing:

www.onlim.com

• Yearly Tourism Fast Forward event in Mayrhofen, Tyrol:

http://tourismfastforward.com

www.sti-innsbruck.at

Contact and Follow us

• Paper reference:

– Fensel, A., Kärle, E., Toma, I. "TourPack: Packaging and Disseminating Touristic Services with

Linked Data and Semantics". In Proceedings of the1st International Workshop on Semantic

Technologies (IWOST), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol-1339, ISSN 1613-0073, pp. 43-54,

11-12 March 2015, Changchun, China.

• TourPack project coordinator - Anna Fensel: www.anna.fensel.com

• TourPack project website: http://tourpack.sti2.at

• Website (ONLIM): www.onlim.com

• Twitter (ONLIM): https://twitter.com/onlim_com

• Facebook (ONLIM):

https://www.facebook.com/pages/ONLIM/255769271295093

• LinkedIn (ONLIM): https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlim

•