Abstract:

Introducing the semantic Web technology into traditional tourism information system is a response to some problems of the present tourism information system in a Webbased environment. This paper presents the ontology establishing process and ontological architecture for the semantic Web. The methodology consists of building two separate ontologies, one for the user profile and another concerning tourism information and data. The classes hierarchy, properties, relations, instances and axioms derived from classes and slots are clearly defined to support the transparent information sharing and interoperability in semantics. The process of ontology evaluation indicates that, through the tourism ontology applications, the system can guarantee the consistency and completeness of domain knowledge and provide intelligence services in a more efficient way.

Key words: tourism, ontology, semantic Web, axioms, reasoning