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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>TourPack: Packaging and Disseminating Touristic Services with Linked Data and Semantics</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Anna Fensel</string-name>
          <email>anna.fensel@sti2.at</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Elias Kärle</string-name>
          <email>elias.kaerle@sti2.at</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ioan Toma</string-name>
          <email>ioan.toma@sti2.at</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>University of Innsbruck, Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck Technikerstr. 21a</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>6020 Innsbruck</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="AT">Austria</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>43</fpage>
      <lpage>54</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>While the touristic service offers become present and bookable in abundance on the ICT communication channels, TourPack aims to build 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 will be able to cater to creating the most optimal travel experience for the traveler. Further, the service packages will 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.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>Services</kwd>
        <kwd>eTourism</kwd>
        <kwd>Semantic Technology</kwd>
        <kwd>Linked Data</kwd>
        <kwd>Online Booking Systems</kwd>
        <kwd>Social Media</kwd>
        <kwd>Mobile Apps</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>During the past decades, the internet, especially the Web, as well as the mobile
channels, have become the most important sources for planning and booking of trips,
holidays and business travels. With this trend of the Web systems gaining more
importance for the touristic service ecosystem, the appearance of the Linked Open Data,
in combination with conventionally used proprietary semi-structured information
sources and on-line services, delivers growing and significant potential to efficiently
publish and access touristic offers.</p>
      <p>Data centric information channels currently provide machine-processable
information such as mountain bike routes or public transport schedules, restaurants with
specific food preferences; on-line services allow booking of hotels, skipasses, concert
tickets, etc. Making touristic services easy to publish for the service providers and
easy to find and book for the tourists are the key challenges for the production of a
complete online service tourist offer package. The abundance and variety of travel
services and the restricted time the travelers typically have on vacations or in business
trips, touristic service search, selection and combination requires a lot of effort from
the service consumer, when aiming at an optimal travel experience. Also, as in many
service-oriented businesses nowadays, the touristic service consumers want
individualized experiences and no longer want the “one-size fits all” touristic packages, as, for
example, produced in a generic way by travel agencies. Thus, the aim of TourPack0F1 is
to design and a prototype a production system that creates “on-demand” touristic
packages catering to the individual touristic service consumer needs and preferences –
applying the smart usage of the open and proprietary data for the information
integration and service composition, and eventually, improving the multi-stakeholder
datadriven production processes of touristic service offer. Further, the pilot service
prototypes will showcase the TourPack approach and infrastructure, and involve the real
end user communities with varying sociodemographic factors and gender
characteristics.</p>
      <p>This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, the current state of the art and the
needed steps beyond are presented. The addressed problems and typical user scenario
examples are in Section 3. The TourPack approach to the solution is described in
Section 4. Finally, Section 5 concludes and summarizes the paper.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. State of the Art and Current Knowledge</title>
      <p>Progress beyond the state of the art in TourPack is mainly in more efficient and
interoperable booking of travel services by delivering a technical touristic service
production system solution that integrates: (1) booking through various
heterogeneous channels and devices, providing mobile access not as a separate solution but
as an integrated aspect of a multi-channel communication, interaction and value
exchange framework, (2) service combinations of core and external added value
services and (3) yield management over heterogeneous channels and devices. The
progress in these relevant main directions is as follows:</p>
      <p>(1) Mobile channels In this world of constant connectivity, consumer interactions
with enterprises have transcended to the online world. The increasing number of
mobile users around the world creates new opportunities for enterprises. Nevertheless,
mobile users have different expectations in the way they access the information and
services that shall not be neglected, especially by the tourism business, where a bad
impression on a customer might bring fatal consequences. They want to connect to
enterprises wherever, whenever, however they want, and will easily move elsewhere
if dissatisfied.</p>
      <p>
        Furthermore, consumers are more and more interested in communication via
different (and multiple) channels. The ability to answer customer demands wherever
they are, and using the channel and device of their choice, will make a huge impact in
their experience and consequently in the business. The fact that customers want
access to all the services
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">(Gaffney, 2007)</xref>
        creates the necessity of an integrated strategy.
Mobile services must be integrated in the business process, not seen as a separate
endeavor.
      </p>
      <p>
        To demonstrate the importance of the mobile experience, Google
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">(Google, 2012)</xref>
        took a deeper look at users’ expectations and reactions towards their site experiences
on mobile devices. Most interestingly, 61% of people said that they would quickly
move onto another site if they did not find what they were looking for right away on a
mobile site. The bottom line: Without a mobile-friendly site (that could be extended
1 TourPack project: http://tourpack.sti2.at
to mobile access to services) one will be driving users to the competitors. Having a
great mobile site is no longer just about making a few more sales. It’s become a
critical component of building strong brands, nurturing lasting customer relationships, and
making mobile work.
      </p>
      <p>
        Regarding the mobile experience, many customers prefer interactions via online
channels rather than face to face, a fact that is currently supported by the increased
number of mobile devices within the customer’s reach. An appropriate mobile
strategy integrated in the online multichannel world will also benefit the management and
customer service for the tourism business
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">(Revinate, 2012)</xref>
        .
      </p>
      <p>The initiative GoMo1F2 from Google is a good example of best practices for
companies to embrace the mobile world, providing also technical advice on how to make
this adaptation while taking into account the expected effect.</p>
      <p>In terms of current alternatives, there is a lack of integrated mobile support
for a multi-channel communication and booking. In TourPack we enable
mobility as an integrated feature, facilitating as a final goal the value exchange with the
customers.</p>
      <p>
        (2) Service Integration There are several approaches for spontaneous service
integration: A technique to integrate web services into Jini service applications on the fly
is proposed in
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">(Gannod et al., 2003)</xref>
        . Jini (also called Apache River) is a framework
for the creation of distributed systems by the integration of modular services. In
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">(Gannod et al., 2003)</xref>
        web services are used as Jini services by wrapping WDSL to
Jini. The wrapping tool generates the services source code, the interface source and
the Jini connection source. Using this approach the services can only be integrated
into Jini applications. The solution supports the integration of WSDL based web
services, but other web services like semantic web services or deep web services are not
considered.
      </p>
      <p>
        In
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">(Leong et al., 2009)</xref>
        an intelligent web services architecture framework for on
the fly service integration is introduced. The framework includes functionalities like
service discovery, service engagement and service on the fly integration. The
framework handles OWL-S, WSBPEL, WSDL, WSMO, WS-CDL and other SOA
standards. However, it is not able to discover and handle deep web services.
      </p>
      <p>
        MySIM is a spontaneous service integration middleware presented in
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">(Ibrahim et
al., 2009)</xref>
        . It consists of four modules for the integration of services on the fly. The
translator module translates all kinds of different services like web services into a
generic service model. The generator module composes adequate services. The
evaluation module evaluates the previous equivalence and composition relations. The last
module, the builder module, implements the compositions and integrates the services
in a chosen technology model. MySIM offers techniques for the spontaneous
integration (translation) of OSGi and standard web services, but it cannot translate and
integrate services from the deep web.
      </p>
      <p>Our approach to the service integration will close the gaps of the approaches
introduced above and create a production solution for the dynamic integration of
touristic web services and deep web services on the fly that will enable the
creation of enhanced integrated services that combine core and external added value
services.
2 http://www.howtogomo.com</p>
      <p>
        (3) Yield management Yield management2F3
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">(Weiß, S. Haüßler, 2005)</xref>
        refers to the
business activities that companies are doing in the scope of maximizing profits from a
fixed and finite resource (e.g. availability of lodging businesses, airplane seats, etc.).
Yield management could be considered as a multi-disciplinary concept as it needs
information and data from various sources and departments. In this world of
multichannel distribution, multi-channel booking and multi-channel communication, the
application of yield management in the most effective way is becoming a tough
challenge for researchers to solve and make it available for use to the various business
domains. The heterogeneity of the multi-channel ecosystem hinders the maintenance
of offers as there are different constraints introduced from the various channels.
Moreover, the major objective of maximizing the profits from a limited resource
should be extended to cover the offering of combined services from various service
providers.
      </p>
      <p>
        Tourism is a domain with many cases relevant to the objectives of yield
management
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">(Amersdorffer et al., 2010)</xref>
        . In the hotel industry it is also known as revenue
management
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">(Fandel, 2005)</xref>
        . For instance, an hotelier has a finite number of rooms,
which should be sold in a way that the profit is maximized and the cost is reduced to a
minimum level. Yield management in tourism consists of various aspects like
capacity management
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">(Xylander, 2003)</xref>
        , overbooking, dynamic pricing, length of stay (e.g. a
lot of hotels are promoting offers with the two nights stays minimum due to yield
management results), price limits (i.e. in relation to the average rate in the city of the
hotel), last-minute reservations etc. In this respect hoteliers need to employ the
appropriate tools in order to properly apply yield management and monetize its benefits. An
example of such a tool is the Amadeus Hotel Platform3F4, which helps hoteliers to
follow the revenue management objectives and fill their hotel rooms or other service
capacities at the most profitable price.
      </p>
      <p>
        According to
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">(Hayes and Miller, 2010)</xref>
        the revenue management lifecycle for
hotels includes five major steps, namely: a) establish prices, b) forecast demand, c)
manage inventory, d) manage distribution, and e) evaluate results. The first step
consists of the price establishment of the offered services and incorporates feedback from
the last step of the previous iteration (in case it exists), the evaluation of results.
Afterwards, the customer demand can be estimated (“forecast demand”), the
management of the available rooms (“manage inventory”) is required and the distribution
channels should be carefully managed to maximize revenue. The management of the
distribution channels should be done in a way that minimizes the transaction costs and
supports the maximization of the profit. Furthermore, the lifecycle of the yield
management needs to be adapted to the offer of combined services in order to cover the
package offerings that tourism businesses are promoting in nowadays (e.g.
accommodation package integrated with car rental services).
      </p>
      <p>The aim of the proposed solution is closely related to the steps that are
considered crucial for the materialization of yield management. We enable the touristic
service provider to manage the multi-channel communication and incorporate
feedback that is gathered through the “forecast demand” and the “evaluate
results” phases, which are the second and fifth steps of revenue management,
re3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management
4 http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/hotel-platform.html
spectively. In addition, the optimal management of the distribution channels (i.e.
“manage distribution” phase) will be facilitated by minimizing the transaction
costs and maximizing the profit via the direct bookability of the tourism services.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Description of Problem and User Scenarios</title>
      <p>The internet, web-based communication and booking channels are becoming
increasingly important in today’s completive world. Organizations of all sizes, commercial
and not-for-profit, regularly face the challenge of communicating with their
stakeholders using a multiplicity of channels, e.g. websites, videos, PR activities, events,
email, forums, online presentations, social media, mobile applications, and recently
structured data.</p>
      <p>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.</p>
      <p>On the other hand, the booking market is moving online. In this context, data
centered platforms – e.g. supporting booking, social media and mobile presence, are also
becoming new dissemination and even main channels for touristic service providers
to reach the customers. Currently, there are more than 100 booking platforms
available on which the hotelier could be present.</p>
      <p>Hence, the first challenge that needs to be addressed is visibility. To be found by
relevant customers the tourism service provider needs to ensure to be have the
outreach to the most relevant customers as possible. This requires apart from time and
resources, competence in the field of online marketing and commerce (which is
intended to be supported by the interoperable intelligent service composition
mechanisms).</p>
      <p>This highlights the challenge of scalability, which is another problem that needs to
be addressed in this context. The average time required for a service business to
maintain a profile of a medium sized hotel at one portal is between 5 to 15 minutes a day.
An effort of maintaining a business’s profile on 100 portals would then require at
least 20 hours of work which for a medium size business, is a lot of time, effort and
finally money that has to be invested in something that distracts the hoteliers from
focusing on the core business. Tourism service providers are thus facing a challenging
multi-channel problem by having to maintain the right balance of rooms’ availability
across more than 100 channels on a daily basis. This obviously does not scale. Being
accurate and visible in all the channels is a must in order to increase revenues. Yield
management also plays an important role in this context. Adopting your offer and
your price dynamically in response to the behavior of your (on-line visible)
environment and selecting the right channel and customer will become critical to economic
success.</p>
      <p>In addition to the growing number of online channels, there are an increasing
number of possibilities to access them. Mobile devices have become a popular means to
access and book tourist related content and services online. It is therefore crucial for
hotels to also be bookable through mobile devices, since most of the bookings will be
done via mobile applications in future.</p>
      <p>Due to these recent developments, competence in on-line communication and
marketing as well as on-line sales is crucial for ensuring the competiveness of a country
with a large tourism intake. Losing the value of bookings via payment of
commissions should be limited as far as possible. Consider the booking of hotel rooms as an
example. More than 12% of all on-line hotel room bookings in Austria are done
through hotel booking channels such as HRS or booking.com4F5. A portal such as HRS
takes 18% of the price of a hotel room for offering this service. On a global scale, we
are also seeing rising worldwide competitors such as Google, that are defining and
implementing new business models and techniques for online marketing and booking
that may once again change the transfer and distribution of these fees. Losing control
and competence in this cornerstone of the tourist value chain may generate significant
risk for the economic and social future of Austria as a touristic destination.
Maintaining competence and competiveness in on-line marketing may therefore be key to
future prosperity.</p>
      <p>Summing up it can be said that touristic service providers need an integrated
production solution that provides management and execution of communication and
booking goals primarily in an automated fashion, with costs equivalent to mass-media
communication, along with the granularity of individual experts, and at the pace of
real-time social media. We are aiming to mechanize important aspects of these tasks,
allowing scalable, cost-sensitive, and effective communication for small-or-medium
sized business units and comparable organizations for which information
dissemination is essential, but resources are significantly limited. Considering these challenges,
it is crucial for all touristic service providers to introduce appropriate technical
solutions to be competitive in a future online world and to maintain their current ability to
participate in the economic tourist value chain.</p>
      <p>On the other hand, for touristic service consumers, the data-driven production
service system would certainly be crucial when finding and consuming the most
relevant services on the fly. Below, as typical end user scenarios, two short stories
describe a customer (guest) on an average day on holidays and show how the software
can be integrated in a hotel's and a hotel-guest's every-day business.</p>
      <p>End user scenario A. 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 (Fig. 1).
5 http://www.slideshare.net/Roli1219/the-power-of-online-traval-agencies-ota (slide 25)
End user scenario B. After G made her/his reservation she/he struggles to find the
restaurant the reservation is made at. The tourist service consumer takes out his/her
phone, browses to the page of the touristic service production data and finds the
preferred transportation directions – based on the open data of public transport, taxi
services and maps, which easily guide him/her to the desired lunch (Fig. 2).</p>
      <p>Naturally, the touristic service production system would extend to heterogeneous
types of services (e.g. in wellness, shopping, sports, culture), and in the same
personalized manner would deliver to the end users packaged offers for experiences
matching their expectations.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Goals and Results</title>
      <p>TourPack generates the next generation of technologies for eTourism that can be
easily deployed in the hospitality industry and needed to ensure visibility, interaction,
and access to tourist services. Specifically, TourPack aims at providing pragmatic
technology for online touristic service offer production and its efficient and scalable
multi-channel online communication and booking through a multitude of channels
(i.e. web sites, wikis, social media channels) through various mobile devices. The
major TourPack technical objectives are:
i. design and implement a scalable online service packaging and provisioning
solution based on machine-processable semantics. Scalability is achieved by
introducing a layer of abstraction over all communication channels as well as a
layer for capturing customer domain information. These two layers can then be
dynamically mapped and connected, depending on the particular use case and
direction of information propagation (publishing of messages or collection of
feedback).
ii. deliver the technology for interacting with this multi-channel solution through
various and heterogeneous mobile channels. We will develop a mobile toolkit
that can be used to develop adapters, integrate and use mobile channels into the
TourPack framework.
iii. 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. We would like
to support the hospitality industry in optimizing their revenue and profit
management through easy and liquid booking in numerous channels and through
numerous devices. We provide support in empowering the service provider towards
low-fee (e.g., direct) booking opportunities to reduce the share of the income that
is taken by external booking providers.
iv. validate and apply the TourPack research and development outcome in pilots
focusing on the booking of tourism services. We will show how TourPack
technology will enable tourism enterprises to simplify and automate their
communication activities, to engage possible customers via this multitude of channels, to
gain visibility and in the end to increase their income by gaining more direct
booking but also by saving on fees that are required by some of the booking
channels.</p>
      <p>
        Today’s service ecosystems, including the ones addressing travel service offers,
deal with increasing quantities of unstructured and semi-structured information in
emails, text documents, spreadsheets, webpages, news articles, collaborative posts,
social media to name but a few. Unstructured and semi-structured information is a
vital part of an enterprise, for daily operations as well as for long-term strategic
management. While these resources contain truly valuable contents, they are of limited
use if they cannot automatically be handled by applications. Extracting knowledge
from unstructured and semi-structured sources is the focus of Information Extraction
(IE) research. TourPack developments are aiming at providing a state-of-the-art
IEdriven semantic tool for (semi-)automatic touristic service semantic annotations and
packaging in order to heavily reduce manual data entry for the population of the
touristic service providers and consumers. IE is often supported by domain ontologies in
order to identify the ontological concepts and relations that semantically describe the
text content
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">(Kiryakov et al., 2003)</xref>
        . Proof of concept systems such as SOFIE
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">(Suchanek et al., 2009)</xref>
        can parse natural language documents and extract ontological
facts. Systems such as YAGO (mpi-inf.mpg.de/yago-naga) and Kylin/KOG
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">(Wu and
Weld, 2008)</xref>
        exploit supplementary semantics from Wikipedia and WordNet to
extract semantically enhanced information from textual data. Semantic annotation
platforms such as KIM (ontotext.com/kim), GATE (http://gate.ac.uk) or OpenCalais
(http://www.opencalais.com) locate and extract entities, relationships, and facts in
texts, and create semantic links between different documents, data, domain models,
and Linked Data. Once extracted from various sources, relevant manufacturing
ecosystem knowledge can be inter-linked and then clustered in order to enable better
search and navigation of virtual artefacts. This can be realized using approaches and
techniques such as those provided by LarKC (larkc.eu) or LOD2 (lod2.eu). LarKC
developed methods and tools to recognize entities and relations, and to interlink these
entities with existing documents to provide richer search experiences. LOD2
supported Sindice (sindice.com), a platform for building applications on top of RDF-based
Linked Data.
      </p>
      <p>We will 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 will 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.</p>
      <p>As confirmed by the industry partners involved in this proposal, costs remain the
main decisive factor for SME adoption of innovative ICT solutions. We plan to build
upon open source tools for information extraction, interlinking and clustering many of
the ones mentioned above. In particular we will consider OpenCalais for information
extraction as well as linking and clustering tools developed by LarKC and LOD2
projects.</p>
      <p>Further, the TourPack approach addresses a number of innovative challenges, and
expected technical outcome and own contributions of the project are summarized in
the following table:</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Challenge</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Multi-channel communication</title>
        <p>
          see
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">(Fensel et al., 2012)</xref>
          ,
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">(Toma
et al., 2013)</xref>
          , (Fensel et al.,
2014)
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>Online interactions</title>
        <p>
          see
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">(Fensel et al., 2014)</xref>
          ,
(Stavrakantonakis et al.,
20141)
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>Outcome</title>
        <p>Semantic based representation of content
(ontology) in intuitive and familiar terminology
for tourist service providers.</p>
        <p>Scalable methods for separating and
interweaving content and communication
channels, particularly, employing linked data
as an integration platform.</p>
        <p>Online multi-channel communication technical
solution.</p>
        <p>Formal communication pattern description
mechanism as business processes.</p>
        <p>Reusable set of communication patterns to
structure the online interactions for the tourism
domain.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-5">
        <title>Service integration and yield management</title>
        <p>
          see
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref19">(Toma et al., 2014)</xref>
          ,
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18 ref19">(Stavrakantonakis et al.,
20141)</xref>
          , (Stavrakantonakis et al.,
2014-2)
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-6">
        <title>Mobile service provisioning</title>
        <p>
          see (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">Kärle, 2014</xref>
          ),
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">(Davies et
al., 2011)</xref>
          , (Qiao et al., 2015)
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>6 Conclusion</title>
      <p>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.</p>
      <p>A technique for enablement touristic service
providers to annotate their offers employing
linked data for the subsequent multi-platform
reuse.</p>
      <p>Online mobile strategy definition for tourism
organizations.</p>
      <p>Mobile toolbox for the integration of booking
services for travel service providers.</p>
      <p>Mobile framework and components for
multichannel and online interactions management.</p>
      <p>This paper presents the TourPack approach to designing, developing and deploying
touristic service packages based on semantic technology as an enabler for tourists and
tourism businesses to participate productively by providing new experiences and
finding new direct dissemination and booking channels, while leveraging on touristic data
value chain.</p>
      <p>
        The effort already runs pilots, such as with Touristic Association of Innsbruck, and
already implemented semantic dissemination support by implementing schema.org
support on their website5F6 and publishing the touristic data of the Innsbruck region as
linked open data
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref19">(Toma et al., 2014)</xref>
        . Also, in cooperation with SalzburgerLand, the
touristic data of Salzburg are published in Linked Open Data format with schema.org,
and are usable6F7. We are deploying our solution also with direct touristic service
providers: starting with hotels, and extending to further touristic services.
      </p>
      <p>Acknowledgments. This work has been partially funded by projects TourPack and
OpenFridge, supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) within the
program “Future ICT”, FWF-funded project OntoHealth, as well as an EU-funded
project BYTE, and ÖAD project RESIDE. The author gratefully acknowledges useful
inputs of TourPack industry partners: Austrian SMEs m-Pulso, Redlink and Seekda,
members of OC working group7F8, as well as the STI Innsbruck’s start-up ONLIM8F9,
specializing on online social media marketing.
6 Website of Touristic Association of Innsbruck: www.innsbruck.info
7 SalzburgerLand Data Hub: http://data.salzburgerland.com
8 Online Communication (OC) Working Group: http://oc.sti2.at
9 ONLIM – Online Communication and Marketing Tool: http://onlim.com</p>
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