Title: A semantic portal for the tourism and hospitality industry: its design, use and acceptance

Authors: G. Michael McGrath, Brooke Abrahams

Addresses: Centre for Hospitality and Tourism Research (CHTR), Victoria University, P.O. Box 14428, Melbourne City MC 8001, Australia. ' Centre for Hospitality and Tourism Research (CHTR), Victoria University, P.O. Box 14428, Melbourne City MC 8001, Australia

Abstract: A |Semantic Portal| is similar to a traditional cyberspace portal, except that web resources are indexed using a rich domain ontology (a specification of key domain concepts) as opposed to, for example, a list of keywords. |AcOntoWeb| (Accommodation Onto the Web) was originally designed as a website (and web services) package, customised for accommodation enterprises within the T&H sector. It has now been implemented as a semantic portal and, in this paper, we provide an overview of the portal, with an emphasis on cross-portal ontology integration and its powerful query processing capabilities. A survey, assessing the willingness of Australian accommodation enterprise operators to use this new technology, is also presented.

Keywords: internet; enterprise management; semantic portals; semantic web; knowledge representation; ontology integration; query processing; online technology acceptance; Australia; tourism; hospitality industry.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIEM.2007.014088

International Journal of Internet and Enterprise Management, 2007 Vol.5 No.2, pp.178 - 196

Published online: 18 Jun 2007 *

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