Unified Ontology for Data Integration for Tourism Sector
Chhavi Virmani1, Sapna Sinha2, Sunil Kumar Khatri3
1,2,3
Amity Institute of Information Technology, Amity University
1
chhavi.virmani15@gmail.com; 2ssinha4@amity.edu; 3skkhatri@amity.edu
Abstract: Tourists nowadays have to overcome a wide range
of challenges whilst making their itineraries due to the
necessity of sorting through many different sources of
information. To assist them throughout the process, we have
developed an ontology called Touringology.
Ontologies have been utilized to bolster both web specialists
thinking and human basic leadership. In spite of the fact
that ontologies had been created with regards to Semantic
Web, it is the Web 2.0 substance that is really inescapable on
the web.
Thus, an ontology is required to make target areas with
difficulties in performing a certain task. Here, we are
targeting the tourism area. Different Ontologies are an
intense learning base that have been widely utilized to speak
to the different tourism ideas. These Ontologies can then be
additionally coordinated to deal with the genuinely necessary
prerequisites of settling the heterogeneity issues emerging in
e-tourism. However, this incorporation of Ontologies may
confound the entire assignment of simplifying the visual
aspects of the important e-tourism information. This paper
gives an ontology, Touringology that will enable the tourist
to simplify their travel plans thus making their stay at the
desired location more enjoyable. Touringology will provide
the tourist information about the accommodation facilities,
food facilities, attractions and transportation facilities
available in the desired area.
Keywords: Ontology- food, accommodation, place, transport,
owl, semantic web evolution.
I. INTRODUCTION
Tourism is one of the most dynamic anddiverseindustries as it
creates a large amount of revenue and growth which helps
boost a nation¶s economy.From the perspective of a tourist,
the processes within the tourism sector can be improved
significantly. Such refinements can be made by
usingontologies with which the tourist can easily plan their
travel trip.Inthis paper, an ontology, Touringology is produced
that takes into account the tourist¶s unique requirements and
ultimately provides a service that exceeds their expectations.
An ontology is an agreed vocabulary that gives a course of
action to realize particularly settled ideas, therefore
developinga huge sum learning that demonstrates the
semantics of wording structures in a succinct manner. It also
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characterizes ideas andtheirconnections outlined with a goal of
information sharingandreuse.Through ontologies, tourists are
provided with comprehensive, objective information about the
overall properties including the advantages and disadvantages
of an area. Contrasted with ascientificclassification, ontologies
overhaul the semantics by giving wealthier associations within
the terms of a vocabulary. Ontologies are mostly imparted
through a reasoning based lingo, so that point by point and
huge capabilities can be made among the classes, properties,
and relations.Ontologies can be used to grow correspondence
amongst individuals and PCs. The three essential purposes of
ontologies (Jasper and, Uschold 1999) are: - to help
correspondence between individuals, to finish interoperability
and correspondence among programming frameworks and to
upgrade the arrangement and the way of programming edge
works [1].
The paper Mathur, (et.al, 2015) gives the survey of existing
ontologies- their advantages and disadvantages. The author
listed the ontologies but none of them was covering all the
classes that the Tourist require for travelling to a place. So,
here we presented the ontology covering all the possible
classes required by the tourist [4].
This paper portrays the ontology which was intendedfor the
visitor. The authors of this ontology considered existing
ontologies however ultimately it was determined thattherewas
no ontology which was appropriate for ourprerequisites.
Therefore, we developed an ontology that focusseson
accommodation, place, food, entertainment exercises and the
transportation facilities required by a tourist to make
theiritinerary.
A. OWL Language
The OWL language is the base of development of this
ontology.
The most conspicuous markup dialect for distributing and
sharing information utilizing ontologies on the web is the Web
Ontology Language (OWL). OWL providesa dialect that can
be utilized to portray the classes andrelations between them
that are inalienable in Webrecordsand applications. OWL is a
vocabulary development of RDF and is attained from the
DAML+OIL vernacular (DAML 2001), with the objective of
empowering a prevalent machine interoperability of Web
substance than the one maintained by XML and RDF. The
 2017 International Conference on Infocom Technologies and Unmanned Systems (ICTUS'2017),
Dec. 18-20, 2017, ADET, Amity University Dubai, UAE
figure here speaks to the advancement of semantic web dialect
[1].
Fig. 1. Semantic Web Evolution
OWL incorporates a layer of expressive vitality to RDFS,
giving viable frameworks to portraying complex ascertained
structures, and formally delineates the semantics of classes
and properties.
OWL has been expected to address the issue for a Web
ontology vernacular. OWL goes above and beyond and
takesintoconsideration depicting properties and classes,
forexample, property sort confinements, equity, property
attributes, classcrossing point, and confined cardinality.
OWL is the proposed standard for Web ontologies. It develops
RDF and RDF Composition. XML-based RDF semantic
structure is used, cases are described using RDF depictions,
and furthermore, most RDFS showing primitives are used.
The W3C's Web Ontology Working Group portrayed OWL as
three unmistakable sub dialects: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and
OWL Full.
OWL Lite underpins the clients essentially requiring
characterization pecking order and the straightforward
imperative components. The benefit of OWL Lite is that it is a
dialect that is less demanding for clients to comprehend and it
is likewise less demanding for designers to execute devices
and applications and far reaching DL and Full forms.
OWL DL supports customers requiring most assistance. OWL
DL is more expressive yet guarantees culmination and
deciding ability, i.e. every one of the estimations will figure
also, and will end too.
OWL Full has most outrageous expressivity and the syntactic
chance of RDF yet does not guarantee figuring. It uses all the
OWL vernacular primitives and the mix of these primitives in
subjective courses with RDF and RDF Schema [2].
B. ProtegeEditor
In this paper, we will use Protege editor as a toolfordeveloping
the proposedontology.
153
Protégé, an open source ontology tool and a learning
organization structure. Protege gives a realistic UI to
characterize ontologies. It additionally incorporates deductive
classifiers to approve that models are steady and to construe
new data in view of the examination of an ontology. Like we
have in Eclipse, Protege is a system for which different
undertakings recommend modules. This application is
composed in Java and intensely utilizes Swing to make the UI.
Protege as of late has more than 300,000 enrolled clients. As
indicated by a 2009 book it is ³the main ontological building
instrument´. Protege is being produced at Stanford University
and is made accessible under the BSD 2-provision license.
Earlier forms of this tool were created as a team with the
University of Manchester.
Protege's module building can be conformed to collect both
fundamental and complex ontology-based applications.
Specialists can fuse the yield of Portege with control systems
or other issue solvers to manufacture a broad assortment of
savvy structures [3].
This paper is organized in the accompanying way. In Section
II, we are describing about the literature survey. In Section III
we depict the presentation of ontology and its development.
The paper is concluded up in Section IV.
II. LITERATURESURVEY
Jorge Cardoso gave the e-tourism ontology that worked to
answer three principle addresses that can be asked when
creating tourism applications: What, Where, and When -
What-What can a vacationer see, visit and what would he be
able to do while remaining at a tourism goal. Where- Where
are the intriguing spots to see and visit found. Where can a
vacationer complete a particular movement, for example,
playing golf or tennis. At the point when. At the point when
can the vacationer visit a specific place. This incorporates not
just the day of the week and the hours of the day, additionally
the air states of the climate. A few exercises can't be attempted
on the off chance that it is raining for instance [1].
Mathur, (et.al, 2015) have prepared a survey on existing
ontologies of tourism sector such as - Mondeca, which
describes the concepts of tourism packages, object profiles and
multimedia based content on tourism. Additionally, the
Harmonise ontology, gives information about the concepts of
accommodation, attraction and food facilities to the tourist.
The Qall Me ontology, includes accommodation, sites, events,
transportation and is mapped with two ontologies WordNet
and SUMO. The OnTour ontology, includes the concepts of
activities, accommodation, date and time, language, currency.
The Hi-Touch ontology offers the provision of customer
queries being answered within a short time period [4].
Research is constantly produced in the field of Ontology
advancement for tourism. Zhao, (et.al, 2015) have described
six steps in their paper about the tourism ontology
 2017 International Conference on Infocom Technologies and Unmanned Systems (ICTUS'2017),
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construction in Africa. They put forward an ontology where
the tourist can search for a place in Africa on their semantic
website and will be able to attain all details of the
surroundings, shopping malls, hotels, restaurants and other
services. They mainly intended to create a user-friendly search
page for tourists in Africa [5].
Siricharoen. W. in his paper laid emphasis on the utilization of
ontologies in the process of building semantic- empowered E-
tourism programming and what¶s more, bundles. While
examining some ontological patterns, the creator outlines
different E-tourism ontologies like Blend, Hi-Touch, SATINE,
and Imagine IT and investigates each of its components. The
paper uncovers the significance of utilizing ontologies in
building semantic-empowered E-tourism bundles and clarifies
the utilization of RDF to depict an asset in web. RDF is an
xml like metadata dialect [6].
Towards the start of the venture, a few ontologies were
considered for reuse however none were suitable for our area
consequently, we chose to make our own ontology. As a work
of art we utilized the real thesaurus created by the World
Tourism Organization (WTO), an Indian Standard
Organization in order to create a global standard in tourism.
This thesaurus characterizes exceptionally critical terms which
remain in connection with the tourism industry. To create a
first draft of our ontology, we searched for the parts exercises
and foundations and denoted all terms we needed to
incorporate [7].
Chaves, (et.al, 2012) convey Hontology, an openly accessible
accommoda- tion particular ontology. It reutilizes ideas of
different vocabularies, for example, Dbpedia.org and
Schema.org. It¶s helpful as it provides an extensive variety of
uses inside the settlement segment, counting ontology-based
data, extraction, content explanation and data perception [8].
Boulos (et.al, 2015) have reviewed various food ontologies,
for instance, the Food Products Ontology/FOODpedia. Open
Food Facts, Food-Wiki, FOODS-Diabetes Edition, and
AGROVOC multilingual agrarian thesaurus. These are the
food ontologies, with suitable changes and in conjunction with
other huge non-food ontologies, can supplement the specified
inquiry databases to create a more helpful application whereby
people can be provided with customized foods that are
appropriate for the individual considering their unique
preferences and health requirements (as the ultimate goal is to
assist clients in making the most satisfying decisions) [9].
Houda (et.al, 2010) exhibit an open transportation space
ontology that considers distinctive ideas considered suitable to
travelers. The ontology is developed in OWL language using
Protege. Utilizing genuine examples and deductions, we
demonstrate the ontology application¶s significance and
consistency [10].
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Jones (et.al, 2001) show an ontology of place that joins
restricted facilitate information with subjective spatial
connections between spots. This tight-fisted model of place is
planned to bolster data recovery undertakings that might be
worldwide in extension. This ontology is realized via semantic
showing structure associating unstructured connected chains
of significance with the place ontology. A various leveled
separate way is consolidated with Euclidean separation within
place centroids to make the mixture spatial separation
measure. This is consolidated with topical separation, in view
of characterization semantics, to make a coordinated semantic
measure that can be utilized for the significance positioning of
recovered articles [11].
III. ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
We chose the tool editor Protege, a java based editor
developed by Stanford University to create this ontology. To
develop an ontology, we needed to understand the classes and
properties to be used. These are the methods we adopted for
this ontology development:
Step 1 - Determining the scope of this ontology
Identify the general interests of tourists whilst travelling,
specifically acknowledging the purpose of their trip. This
paper will make trips more satisfying through the use of
semantic web technology.
Step 2 - Analysing the existing ontology
This process involves analysing the existing tourism
ontologiesto determine the concepts that are appropriate for
the development of this ontology.
Step 3 - Understanding the concepts to be taken on for the
construction of the ontology
In this paper, the concepts the ontology takes into account are-
accommodation, places, dining, entertainment activities and
transportation.
Step 4 - Defining the classes
The classes created are - accommodation, places, dining,
entertainment activities and transportation.
Step 5 - Defining the subclasses
Subclasses which will be included under the main classes such
as for accommodation, the subclasses are - apartments, hotels,
guest houses/PG, for places- beaches, cultural centres,
historical places, gardens, religious places, for dining- restau-
rants, food courts, dhabas, cafes, for entertainment activities-
theater, cinema halls, amusement parks, museums, art
galleries, for transportation- metro, train, aeroplane, bus, cab,
auto rickshaw.
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Dec. 18-20, 2017, ADET, Amity University Dubai, UAE

The class hierarchy is shown in Figure 2. The relations

depicted here are- a tourist stays in an accommodation, a
tourist eats food, a tourist travels by transport, a tourist visits
places, a tourist enjoys entertainment activities.

Fig. 3. OntoGraf of the ontology

Fig. 2. Class Hierarchy (with classes and subclasses)

Step 6 - Defining the properties

The properties basically indicate the relationship between the
classes. The properties included in here are - travels by,
enjoys, stays in, visits and eat and their relation with each
class is depicted in Table1.

TABLE 1: Object Properties used in the ontology

OBJECT DOMAIN RANGE

PROPERTIES
eats Tourist Dining
Fig. 4. Properties used in the ontology
enjoys Tourist Entertainment_activities
The Figure 4 depicts the properties that are used by Tourist
stays_in Tourist Accommodation class and other classes. The property depicts how the
travels_by Tourist Transportation particular class is connected to other class- like Tourist (class)
eats Dining (another class), so here, eat is a property. The
visits Tourist Places other property and their relation with Tourist class is shown in
Table1.
Step 7 - Developing the class hierarchy

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 2017 International Conference on Infocom Technologies and Unmanned Systems (ICTUS'2017),
Dec. 18-20, 2017, ADET, Amity University Dubai, UAE
IV. CONCLUSION
The ontology so developed- Touringology will be beneficial to
tourists as it enables them to not only take maximum
advantage of the facilities available in their location, but also
ensures that their itinerary meets their expectations.
Touringology will provide the details about the food,
transportation, accommodation and sight-seeing in the tourist
areas.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
As Authors we express our profound appreciation to The
Founder President of Amity Group, Dr. Ashok K. Chauhan,
for his distinct fascination in advancing research in Amity
University and the fact that he has motivated us to accomplish
extraordinary statures.
REFERENCES
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