In this paper we report our ongoing work on Puglia@Service, a PON Research & Competitivity project aimed at creating an innovative service infrastructure for the Apulia Region, Italy. A sector of interest to the project for the application of the infrastructure is Integrated Tourism. In this sector, we have defined Semantic Web Services following the OWL-S approach. The services have been based on OWL ontologies in the domain of travel and tourism, which have been populated with data of Apulia. This will enable users and software agents to automatically discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources o↵ering services, under specified constraints, for Integrated Tourism in Apulia.
Introduction
Tourism activity is becoming more competitive, more extensive, more
complicated, and more demanding of host communities and their culture and
environment. Tourism planning has been beset by a number of new challenges such as the
ones posed by the principles of sustainable development. In order for the tourism
enterprise in any destination area to respond positively to these challenges, it is
necessary for tourism planning to be practised in a fashion commensurate with
the needs of the destination area and the nation. Many reasons are o↵ered for
tourism planning, not least the advocacy that planning is the best way of
extending the vital life-cycle of a destination by providing a means of anticipating
changes, adjusting to the demands of change, and exploring new opportunities.
However, integrating tourism planning into ocial planning - whether economic,
social, welfare, environmental, infrastructure, or cultural - has been slow, and
remains unusual. The ideal model would be a national/regional/local
comprehensive planning system in which tourism is an integral component. This model
is rare, which is not surprising, as the various component strategies within tourism
are seldom integrated. The goal of Integrated Tourism is twofold. For the various
interests, requirements and needs the aim is to be fused together into a
composite, integrated strategic tourism plan. For tourism the aim is to be planned
with the intention of being fused into the social and economic life of a region and
its communities. Although there is evidence that some tourism destinations have
developed without conscious strategic and integrated planning, many of them
have experienced unforeseen consequences (either physical, or human, or
marketing or organizational impacts) which have led to their deterioration. Integrated
Tourism has turned out be crucial in the sustainable development of rural areas
(so-called Integrated Rural Tourism) [
Semantic Web Services are among the semantic technologies which are going
to be applied in Puglia@Service. Just like conventional web services, Semantic
Web Services are the server end of a client-server system for machine-to-machine
interaction via the World Wide Web (or simply, the Web) [
Structure of the paper. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 summarizes the goals of the Puglia@Service project as for the application to Integrated Tourism. Section 3 shortly describes a domain ontology for Integrated Tourism, named OnTourism, which has been modeled for being used within Puglia@Service. Section 4 briefly presents a Web Information Extraction tool, named WIE-OnTour, which has been developed for populating OnTourism with data automatically retrieved from the Web. Section 5 illustrates some of the Semantic Web Services which have been defined on top of OnTourism for supporting Integrated Tourism in Apulia. Section 6 provides an overview of related work. Section 7 concludes the paper with final remarks and directions of future work. Appendix A provides further details of the OWL-S approach. 2
Integrated Tourism Services in Apulia The research conducted in the Puglia@Service project falls within the area of Internet-based Service Engineering, i.e. it investigates methodologies for the design, development and deployment of innovative services. Concerning this area, the project will have an impact on the Apulia regional system at a strategic, organizational and technological level, with actions oriented to service innovation for the “sustainable knowledge society”. The reference market of Puglia@Service is represented by the so-called Knowledge Intensive Services (KIS), an emerging category of the advanced tertiary sector, and transversal to the other economic sectors, that is supposed to play a prominent role within the restructuring process which will follow the world economic crisis.
Objective of the project is to promote a new service culture over the Apulia region, marking a discontinuity point in the local development model, and guiding the transition of the region towards the “smart territory” paradigm where the 5 http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/ 6 http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-wsdl20-primer-20070626/ territory is intended to be a multiplayer system able to improve, by means of an adequate technological and digital infrastructure, its attitude to innovation as well as its skills in managing the knowledge assets of the regional stakeholders.
The project will pursue this goal through process and product innovations. In particular, it proposes to radically innovate the processes of service conceptualization, design, development and deployment, by assigning to the user a central role that anticipates his involvement. This will be obtained by applying a userdriven open innovation methodology, created at the US MIT Laboratories and adopted by the European countries, known as “Living-Lab”. The project also defines a set of methodologies and technologies for Internet-based Service Engineering starting from a next generation service model conceived to satisfy the needs for inclusion, participation and personalization. Finally, it is expected to produce not only a pervasive technological infrastructure (like a nervous system for the “smart territory”) but also: – a qualified personnel, educated according to the Innovator and Entrepreneur Engineer profile, i.e. able to catch the opportunities o↵ered by the new technologies and to transfer them into new business models in order to create economic and social value (Technological Entrepreneurship); – a start-up company operating in the Service Engineering area and addressing the European Commission request for “service innovation leaders”. The arrangement of the new service model into the regional context will regard the new generation services of the Public Administration and the Integrated Tourism. In particular, the application of Puglia@Service to Integrated Tourism (Puglia@Service.Tourism) encompasses an intervention on the Apulia tourism system, based on the definition of an Internet-based service model which increases the capability of KIS to create value for the region and for the tourist. Here, the tourist is not only “service user” but also “information supplier”. In particular, the application will require the development of methods and technologies enabling an interaction model between the tourist and the territory with the ultimate goal of local development along three directions: Culture, Environment and Economy. For the purposes of this paper, we shall focus only on the Environment dimension.
Puglia@Service.Tourism aims at promoting forms of tourism with a low environmental impact centered around the notion of eco-compatible mobility. This will contribute to the achievement of a twofold goal. On one side, the tourist will benefit from decision support facilities during his/her tours, e.g. he/she will receive suggestions about sites of interest and public transportation means suitable to reach a certain destination. On the other side, the territory will benefit from the environmental sustainability of local tourism. The reduced environmental impact of eco-mobility together with the need for a more ecent transportation system in touristic places can be obtained by combining sensoring tools and applications with rewarding mechanisms that encourage tourists and citizens to make eco-compatible choices. A possible scenario is described in the following. Once arrived in a touristic destination, the tourist could use his/her smartphone/PDA in order to obtain a suggestion about specific itineraries compliant with his/her profile and the information about the context. The tourist will be informed about the availabiliy of alternative transportation means and will be o↵ered some credits for the green options (biking, trekking, car pooling, car sharing, etc.). In order to support this scenario, the Puglia@Service.Tourism infrastructure should deal with multi-dimensional information useful to suggest a touristic strategy which should meet users’ expectations and preferences (in culture, enogastronomy, shopping, relax, etc.); environmental conditions, both meteorological and natural; multi-modal transportation means; availability of car pooling and car sharing services; transfer time between sites of interest. The “fingerprint” of tourists visiting an area in a given time span can be anonymized and employed to improve continuously the user profiling with the choices made by tourists with the same profile. To this aim it is necessary to track the trajectories of citizens and tourists by means of localization and wireless communication technologies (traces from mobile phones, PDA, vehicles with GPS, etc.).
It is straightforward to notice that Internet-based Service Engineering for KIS in Integrated Tourism should strongly rely on Web technologies - such as Semantic Web Services - enabling an automated service composition. As shown in the rest of the paper, Web services in Puglia@Service.Tourism are enriched with semantic annotations starting from domain ontologies. 3
A Domain Ontology for Integrated Tourism Domain ontologies for tourism are already available, e.g. the travel 7 ontology is centered around the concept of Destination. However, it is not fully satisfactory from the viewpoint of Integrated Tourism. For instance, it lacks concepts modeling the reachability of places. In Puglia@Service.Tourism, we have decided to build a domain ontology, named OnTourism,8 more suitable for the project objectives and compliant with the OWL2 standard.It consists of 359 axioms, 196 logical axioms, 113 classes, 9 object properties, and 14 data properties, and has the expressivity of the DL ALCHOIF (D).
The main concepts forming the terminology of OnTourism model the sites
(class Site), the places (class Place), and the distances between sites (class
Distance). Sites of interest include accommodations (class Accommodation),
attractions (class Attraction), stations (class Station), and civic facilities (class Civic)
as shown in Figure 1. The terminology encompasses the amenities (class Amenity
with subclasses reported in Figure 2) and the services (class Service with
subclasses reported in Figure 3) o↵ered by hotels. Also, it models the ocial 5-star
classification system for hotel ranking (class Rank with instances 1 star, 2 stars,
and so on) as well as a user classification system for accommodation rating (class
Rate with instances Excellent, Very Good, Average, Poor, Terrible). Finally, the
terminology includes landscape varieties (class Landscape with instances City,
Country, Lake, Mountain, River, and Sea) and transportation means (class
Transportation Mean with instances Bike, Car, Foot, and Public transit ). Distances
are further classified into Distance by car and Distance on foot according to the
transportation means used.
7 http://www.protege.cim3.net/file/pub/ontologies/travel/travel.owl
8 It significantly extends the Hotel ontology described in [
The object properties in OnTourism model the relationship between a site and a distance (hasDistance), the relationship between a distance and the two sites (isDistanceFor ), and the relationship between a site and the place where the site is located at (isLocatedAt ). Also, for each accommodation, it is possible to specify the amenities available (hasAmenity ) and the services provided (provides). The user rating allows to classify accommodations into five categories (from Excellent Accommodation to Terrible Accommodation). In the case of hotels, the ranking (hasRank ) is the starting point for the definition of five categories (from Hotel 1 Star to Hotel 5 Stars).
The data properties in OnTourism allow to refer to sites by name and to places by address, zipcode, city, and country. Details about accommodations are the number of rooms (numberOfRooms) and the average price of a room (hasPrice). Distances between sites have a numerical value in either length or time units (hasLengthValue/hasTimeValue). Note that each of these numerical values would be better modeled as attribute of a ternary relation. However, only binary relations can be represented in OWL. The concept Distance and the properties hasDistance, isDistanceFor and hasLengthValue/hasTimeValue are necessary to simulate a ternary relation by means of binary relations. 4
Extraction of Touristic Information from the Web
Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured
information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable
documents. In most of the cases this activity concerns processing human language
texts by means of natural language processing (NLP). The proliferation of the
Web has intensified the need for developing IE systems that help people to cope
with the enormous amount of data that is available online, thus giving raise to
Web Information Extraction (WIE) [
WIE-OnTour is a wrapper-based WIE tool implemented in Java and conceived for the population of OnTourism with data concerning accommodations (in particular, those in the categories “hotel” and “bed&breakfast”) available in the web site of TripAdvisor9. The tool is also able to compute distances of the extracted accommodations from sites of interest (e.g., touristic attractions) by means of Google Maps10 API. Finally, the tool supports the user in the specification of sites of interest.
WIE-OnTour has been tested on several cities in the world. However, the main destinations of Urban Tourism in the Apulia Region are of interest to 9 http://www.tripadvisor.com/ 10 http://maps.google.com/ the project. Therefore, as case studies, we have restricted our attention to capital towns of Apulia provinces (Andria, Bari, Barletta, Brindisi, Lecce, Taranto, Trani). A snapshot of WIE-OnTour performing the information extraction process for Bari, the capital city of Apulia Region, is shown in Figure 4. In this session (performed on May 13, 2014), the tool has extracted 46 hotels (instances of Hotel ), 151 bed&breakfast (instances of Bed and Breakfast ), 205 places (instances of Place), 1996 distances (instances of Distance) for a total of 2406 individuals. The distances have been computed with respect to the following sites of interest: Basilica di San Nicola11 and Cattedrale di San Sabino12 (both instances of Church), Museo Nicolaiano (instance of Museum), Porto di Bari (instance of Port ), Aeroporto Karol Wojtyla (instance of Airport ), and FS Bari Centrale (instance of Train Station). The computation for this session has been completed in about 33 minutes. 5
Adding Semantics to Integrated Tourism Services In Puglia@Service.Tourism, we have defined several services on top of two domain ontologies: travel and OnTourism. For example, destination attractions service is a service that returns the attractions located in a given destination. The semantic description of this service in OWL-S (shown in Figure 5) specifies that it is an atomic service with only one input and only one output where the parameter types for the input and the output are the classes Destination (belonging to travel ) and Attraction (occurring in OnTourism) respectively. Several specializations of destination attractions service have been considered, one for each subclass of the parameter types. For example, city churches service is a service that returns the churches (output parameter of type Church) located in a given city (input parameter of type City ). When executed for the city of, e.g., Bari, the service will query the underlying domain ontologies (more precisely, their instance level) to retrieve each Church that isLocatedAt some Place in Bari, e.g. Basilica di San Nicola and Cattedrale di San Sabino. Note that these instances will be returned also by destination attractions service because they are inferred to be instances of Attraction. As a further case, near attraction accomodations service is a service that returns all the accommodations (output parameter of type Accommodation) near a given attraction (input parameter of type Attraction). Note that closeness can be defined on the basis of the distance between sites (class Distance) either in a crisp way (i.e., when the distance value is under a fixed threshold) or in a fuzzy way (i.e., through grades of closeness). In both ways, however, the computation should consider the transportation means used (Distance by car vs. Distance on foot ) as well as the measure units adopted (hasLengthValue vs. hasTimeValue).
In Puglia@Service.Tourism, we have chosen to define only OWL-S atomic
services in order to exploit the aforementioned advantages of the WSDL grounding.
As an illustration, the WSDL grounding of destination attractions service is
reported in Figure 6. Composite services can be automatically obtained by applying
11 Basilica of St. Nicholas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_di_San_Nicola
12 Cathedral of St. Sabinus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Cathedral
service composition methods such as the one described in [
Related Work
The application of ICT to the tourism industry has been considered
challenging since the very beginning due to the technical issues raised by interoperability.
Werthner and Klein [
Conclusions and Future Work In this paper we have reported our ongoing work on the use of semantic technologies for supporting Integrated Tourism services in the Apulia region within the Puglia@Service project. More precisely, we have shortly described OnTourism, a domain ontology for Integrated Tourism. Also, we have briefly presented WIEOnTour, a Web Information Extraction tool which has been developed for populating OnTourism with data automatically retrieved from the Web sites of TripAdvisor and Google Maps. Moreover, we have illustrated the semantic descriptions in OWL-S of some Integrated Tourism services built on top of OnTourism.
Though developed for the purposes of the project, the technical solutions here described are nevertheless general enough to be reusable for similar applications in other geographical contexts. Notably, they show the added value of having ontologies and ontology reasoning behind an Interned-based service infrastructure.
For the future we intend to apply Machine Learning tools such as
FoilDL [
The OWL-S approach Besides being a service mark-up language, OWL-S is an upper ontology for services whose structuring is motivated by the need to provide three essential types of knowledge about a service (class Service): The service profile (class ServiceProfile), the service model (class ServiceModel ), and the service grounding (class ServiceGrounding ). Generally speaking, the service profile provides the information needed for an agent to discover a service, while the service model and the service grounding, taken together, provide enough information for an agent to make use of a service, once found. More specifically, the three components satisfy the following informative needs.
The service profile tells ”what the service does”, in a way that is suitable for a service-seeking agent (or matchmaking agent acting on behalf of a serviceseeking agent) to determine whether the service meets its needs. This form of representation includes a description of what is accomplished by the service, limitations on service applicability and quality of service, and requirements that the service requester must satisfy to use the service successfully.
The service model tells a client how to use the service, by detailing the semantic content of requests, the conditions under which particular outcomes will occur, and, where necessary, the step by step processes leading to those outcomes. For services based on composite processes, this description may be used by a service-seeking agent in at least four di↵erent ways: (1) to perform a more in-depth analysis of whether the service meets its needs; (2) to compose service descriptions from multiple services to perform a specific task; (3) during the course of the service enactment, to coordinate the activities of the di↵erent participants; and (4) to monitor the execution of the service.
A service grounding specifies the details of how an agent can access a service. Typically a grounding will specify a communication protocol, message formats, and other service-specific details such as port numbers used in contacting the service. In addition, the grounding must specify, for each semantic type of input or output specified in the service model, the serialization techniques employed for exchanging data elements of that type with the service. The most commonly used grounding is WSDL due to the following reasons: (1) An OWL-S atomic process corresponds to a WSDL operation; (2) The inputs and outputs of an OWL-S atomic process correspond to WSDL messages; (3) The types of the inputs and outputs of an OWL-S atomic process correspond to WSDL abstract types. 189
Fig. 1. Taxonomy of sites in the OnTourism ontology. <owl:Ontology rdf:about=""> <owl:imports rdf:resource="http://127.0.0.1/ontology/Service.owl"/> <owl:imports rdf:resource="http://127.0.0.1/ontology/Process.owl"/> <owl:imports rdf:resource="http://127.0.0.1/ontology/Profile.owl"/> <owl:imports rdf:resource="http://127.0.0.1/ontology/Grounding.owl"/> <owl:imports rdf:resource="http://127.0.0.1/ontology/travel.owl"/> <owl:imports rdf:resource="http://127.0.0.1/ontology/OnTourism.owl"/> </owl:Ontology> <service:Service rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_SERVICE"> <service:presents rdf:resource="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROFILE"/> <service:describedBy rdf:resource="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROCESS"/> <service:supports rdf:resource="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_GROUNDING"/> </service:Service> <profile:Profile rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROFILE"> <service:isPresentedBy rdf:resource="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_SERVICE"/> <profile:serviceName xml:lang="en">Destination Attractions Service</profile:serviceName> <profile:textDescription xml:lang="en">
Service that returns attractions located in a given destination. </profile:textDescription> <profile:hasInput rdf:resource="#_DESTINATION"/> <profile:hasOutput rdf:resource="#_ATTRACTIONS"/> <profile:has_process rdf:resource="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROCESS"/> </profile:Profile> <process:AtomicProcess rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROCESS"> <service:describes rdf:resource="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_SERVICE"/> <process:hasInput rdf:resource="#_DESTINATION"/> <process:hasOutput rdf:resource="#_ATTRACTIONS"/> </process:AtomicProcess> <process:Input rdf:ID="_DESTINATION"> <process:parameterType rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#anyURI">
http://127.0.0.1/ontology/travel.owl#Destination </process:parameterType> <rdfs:label/> </process:Input> <process:Output rdf:ID="_ATTRACTIONS"> <process:parameterType rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#anyURI">
http://127.0.0.1/ontology/OnTourism.owl#Attraction </process:parameterType> <rdfs:label/> </process:Output> <grounding:WsdlGrounding rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_GROUNDING">...</grounding:WsdlGrounding> <grounding:WsdlAtomicProcessGrounding rdf:about="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_AtomicProcessGrounding"> ... </grounding:WsdlAtomicProcessGrounding> <owl:Ontology rdf:about="">...</owl:Ontology> <service:Service rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_SERVICE">...</service:Service> <profile:Profile rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROFILE">...</profile:Profile> <process:AtomicProcess rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_PROCESS">...</process:AtomicProcess> <process:Input rdf:ID="_DESTINATION">...</process:Input> <process:Output rdf:ID="_ATTRACTIONS">...</process:Output> <grounding:WsdlGrounding rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_GROUNDING"> <service:supportedBy rdf:resource="#DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_SERVICE"/> <grounding:hasAtomicProcessGrounding>
<grounding:WsdlAtomicProcessGrounding rdf:ID="DESTINATION_ATTRACTIONS_AtomicProcessGrounding"/> </grounding:hasAtomicProcessGrounding> </grounding:WsdlGrounding>