Title: An ontology-based system for intelligent matching of travellers' needs for airline seats

Authors: Dimitris N. Kanellopoulos

Addresses: Department of Tourism Management, Technological Educational Institute of Patras, Patras 26334, Greece

Abstract: In recent years, the airline industry has fostered a dependency on technology for its operational and strategic management. Existing tools for facilitating searches of airline seats availability lack in providing an intelligent matching between available airline seats and the personal requirements of the travellers. The objective of this research work was to design and develop an intelligent web portal to serve as a service provider in the airlines travelling tasks. This portal aims at helping people living in Europe to find airline seats that match their personal travelling preferences. For this purpose, the knowledge of the airlines travelling domain has been represented by means of ontology, which has been used to guide the design of the application and to supply the system with semantic capabilities. Additionally, the ontological component allows for defining an ontology-guided search engine, which provides more intelligent matches between airline seats offers and travelling preferences. Finally, this work covers the design of the ontology and the partial development of the web portal.

Keywords: airlines; ontology; intelligent web portals; airline seats; seat availability; seat search; intelligent matching; traveller requirements; personal preferences; semantics; search engines.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2008.020955

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2008 Vol.32 No.3, pp.194 - 205

Published online: 26 Oct 2008 *

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