TOTN: Development of A Tourism – Specific Ontology For Information Retrieval In Tamilnadu Tourism

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(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,
Vol. 9, No. 6, June 2011

TOTN: Development of a tourism – specific ontology
for information retreival in Tamilnadu tourism
K.R.Ananthapadmanaban, Dr.S.K.Srivatsa,
Research Scholar, Senior Professor,
Sri Chandrasekarendra SaraswathiViswa St.Joseph„s College of Engg.,
Mahavidyalaya University, Jeppiaar Nagar,
Enathur, Kanchipuram-631 561, Chennai-600 064

Abstract—Tourism is an information business. Electronic tourism representation of Knowledge. “Shared” implies that ontology is
is one of the activities that have enjoyed of an important success not supposed to represent the subjective knowledge of some
in the Internet. The constant fast growth in travel related individual, but it captures consensual knowledge accepted by a
information makes it difficult to find, organize, access and group or a community. In short ontology is the manifestation of
maintain the information required by users. E-tourism is a shared understanding of a domain that acquired a consensus,
perfect candidate form Semantic web and the success of Semantic and such consensus can facilitate effective communications.
Web depends on ontologies. Ontology, an explicit specification of This in turn leads to other benefits such as interoperability,
Conceptualization [1] and provides a description of the domain of reuse and sharing [8] [9]. Semantic web is about making the
interest. This paper focus on creating tourism ontology in order
web more understandable by computer [10]. Hence, ontologies
to improve the process of searching for the perfect tourism
package according to user context for Tamilnadu tourism.
form the backbone of semantic web [11] as a method for
knowledge representation and sharing on the web. The
Keywords-component; Ontologies, semantic web, Protégé semantic web architecture lists the underlying machine
tool,OWL understandable languages for knowledge representation. XML
(Extensible Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description
I. INTRODUCTION Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language) are those
The study of E-Commerce in the tourism industry has languages and OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability
emerged as a „frontier area‟ for information technology [2]. of web content than of XML and RDF.
Tourism has become the world‟s largest trade and its expansion OWL is a set of XML elements and attributes, with well-
shows a constant year-to-year raise.”Competitive benefit is no defined meaning, that are used to define terms and their
longer ordinary, but increasingly driven by science, relationships (e.g. Class, equivalent property, intersection Of,
information technology and innovation [3]. The internet is Union Of, etc.,). Reasoning tasks like verification of ontology
already the major source for travelers to plan their trip. Though consistency, computing inferences and realization can be easily
the web is rich of content the users find difficult on retrieving executed with OWL representation.
data from the large set, which consumes more human effort.
Current web has been designed for direct human processing,
III. LITERATURE SURVEY
but the next generation “semantic web “aims at machine
process able information [4]. Recent advances in the semantic Presentation of tourist destinations on the web makes a
web technologies offer means for organization to exchange huge amount of data. As quality of available information is
knowledge in meaningful way [5]. The application that offers large, it is difficult for the tourist to find his desired destination.
these new online solutions is based on ontology. Ontology and Ontology has the potential to improve the process of searching
ontology based information retrieval have the potential to appropriate destination according to user preference. Here we
significantly improve the process of searching on the World are going to analyze various papers on tourism ontologies.
Wide Web. This paper proposes ontology creation for tourism Eleni Tomai, Stavros Michael and Poulicos Prastacos
in Tamilnadu based on the user profile and user interest to explored how the use of ontologies in a web-based
search for perfect destination for tourist. environment can be used for tourism applications. Their
methodology consist of building two separate ontologies, one
II. SEMANTIC WEB LAYER for the user profile and another one concerning tourism
Ontology is an explicit formal specification of shared information and data in order to assist visitors of an area to plan
conceptualization [6] [7]. “Conceptualization means an abstract their visit. The user profile ontology is elicited by user
simplified view of the World. The World actually refers to responses by means of a form (interface) where user can fill the
some phenomenon, topic or subject area in the World. area of interest and tourism ontology developed by the service
“Explicit” means that the type of concepts and the constraints provider. In this paper, reference point for all users is taken to
on using the concept are explicitly defined in the data structure be the centre of city Heraklion. Concepts such as time needed
of ontology. “Formal” indicates that the ontology should be to visit interested destinations, time needed to visit interested
machine interpretable. “Specification” means a declarative destinations from the point of reference, average time to see the

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place and comeback, accessibility of the spot, entrance fees if 2. Arranging classes and the class hierarchy(Hierarchy
any and opening hours of the spot if applicable, are other classes)
crucial parameters 12].
3. Defining the properties and data values for the
classes(Relations and Characteristics)
Robert Barta, Christina Feilmayr, Christoph Grun and 4. Creating instances of the classes
Hannes Werthner explored user preferences which according to
them, it is fundamental to personalise information about tourist Figure 1 shows the generic procedure for ontology building.
objects i.e. user preferences can be aggregated to set of tourist
types. In this paper, concepts like opening hours of point of
interest, opening days of point of interest, time pattern to model
recurring events are included [13].
Waralak V.Siricharoen discusses some ontological trends
that support the growing domain of online tourism. Concepts
like date and time of travel, contact data, tickets and locations
are explored. His focus is on description of accommodation,
infrastructure i.e. many prefer to stay close to an
accommodation that is close as possible to an infrastructure
[14].
Weiwanag Et al. explored how the use of ontologies can
assist tourist plan their trip in Web-based environment. It
consist of two Ontologies on for user profile and the other
concerning about tourism information and data in order to
assist visitors of an area to plan their visit, Bayesian network is
used to estimate the travelers preferred activities[15].

Danica Damljanovic and Vladan Devedzic illustrated how
the semantic web technologies combined with traditional e-
tourism application concepts such as user interest, activities,
age group are used and concepts like vacation packages, types Fig.1. Generic Procedure of Ontology Building
of vacation, traveler‟s types, accommodation, food service,
transportation service and room type in hotel are the valid A. Ontology creation basics
parameters [16].
Tourism ontology can be built to answer four types of
Ou, S., Pekar, V., Orasan, C., Spurk, C., Negri, M explored questions that can be asked when developing the e-tourism
on spatial temporal entities which have both temporal and package. These questions involve the predicates What, Where,
spatial context. It comprised activities, which might be When and How [19].
performed at a certain destination and events which refer to an
1. What [Activities]: What can a tourist do while staying?
occurrences with specific content at a specific location with a
certain time period [17]. Reservations, booking or any kind of 2. Where [Place]: Where are the interesting places located
tickets are temporal entities as they are valid for certain period to see and visit?
of time.
3. When [Season]: When can the tourist visit a particular
place?
On observations, challenges remain for users in reusing
4. How [Transportation]: How can the tourists gets to the
available ontologies information. Lack of standards is very
destination to see or do an activity?
vital issue, and parameters vary from one ontology to another.
In e-tourism different ontologies have been developed for The concepts What, Where, When and How can be
different areas and they might not meet the needs to regional represented as classes. The class What refers to activities
destination for any specific area, they are mostly location that a tourist does while staying such as trekking, water
based. In this paper, we are going to construct tourism games, billiard, cycling etc. The class Where represents
ontology for Indian scenario especially with parameters for places to see and visit. The class When relates to season
Tamilnadu tourism to assist visitors to plan their trip that the tourist can visit the particular place or it can be
accurately. related to time when that tourist spot is open e.g. opening
time of Zoological park or opening days. And the class
IV. CREATING A TOURSIM ONTOLOGY How shows how tourist gets to its destination i.e. preferable
Creating ontology requires the following steps according to mode of transportation e.g. Air, Bus, Rail or Taxi.
Noy and McGuiness [18] A class hierarchy is defined by stating that a class is a
1. Determining the scope of a domain(Area of interest) subclass of another. The class Thing is the class that

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represents the set containing all individuals because of this; B. Tourism Ontology for Tamilnadu - TOTN
all classes are subclass of Thing. The class Trekking, The ontology has been developed using protégé 4.1 beta
Cycling, Swimming are subclasses of Activity. It is also version for travel and tourism domain. Protégé[20] is an
possible to assert that two classes are disjoint from each open source tool which is used to construct knowledge
other. For example class Budget Hotel is disjoint with the based application using ontology. It provides a platform for
class Star Hotel. This ensures that an individual which has creating ontology and form the ontology knowledge base.
been asserted to be a member of one of the classes in the The tool displays and edits ontology in graphical mode. It
group cannot be a member of any other classes in the also helps in building OWL-DL ontology and using
group, i.e. it would not make sense for an individual to be Description Logic Reasoner to check the consistency of the
Budget Hotel and a Star Hotel. There are two main types of ontology and automatically compute the ontology class
properties in OWL. The first one, called the object hierarchy.
property, can be used to relate two individuals e.g.
Accommodation [hasactivity Swimming]. The second is The Tourism Ontology for Tamilnadu (TOTN) is built to
referred as data type property which related an individual to conceptualize TouristSpots, Accommodation, and
XML schema data type value or an RDF literal. Example: Activities during the travel. While creating the ontology,
Visitors [canspend 1500]. certain parameters are being analyzed and our objective is
to answer the following questions initially and we also look
In OWL properties, may have a domain and range at certain aspects which come across while creating
specified. Properties link individuals from the domain to ontology and we are trying to find solutions for the same.
individuals from range. For example in our tourism
ontology if the object property is [isinterested] then the 1) What kind of tourist spots can be assigned to a user
domain will be tourister and range will be Wildlife
based on user interest and preferences?
Sanctuary. Data type properties allow instances to have data
values in specific data types. The OWL uses the data types 2) How can the tourist object such as tourist
borrowed from XML Schema such as “xsd:string”, spots,accommodation, activities and transportation are
„xsd:int”and“xsd:boolean”. Properties can have several mapped for the tourist.
characteristics in representing the relation between classes.
Properties can be symmetry, if the pair (X, Y) is an instance 3) While on tour, which accommodation can tourist
of the symmetric property P then the pair(Y, X) is also an have, based on the constraints accomodation expense.
instance of P. For example, the cousin relationship or friend The TOTN ontology contains five important classes, each
relationship can be asserted to be a symmetric property. class has subclasses. Fig.2 shows the representation of
Properties may be stated to be transitive. If the pair of (X, classes relationship in the travel ontology.
Y) is an instance of transitive property P and the pair(Y, Z)
is an instance of P. For example the ancestor relationship
can be asserted to be a transitive property. Properties can
state to have unique value using functional property whose
minimum cardinality is zero and maximum cardinality is
one. For example [hasAge] can be stated to be a functional
property. Properties also have restrictions so that an
instance can satisfy a certain condition; some of restrictions
are all values from, some values from, hasvalue
mincardinality, maxcardinality and cardinality. Cardinality
Restrictions-Meaning: The property must have at
least/almost/exactly X values. Example: A Family
destination is a destination that has at least one
Accommodation and at least 2 Activities.
allValues From Restrictions-Meaning: All values of the
property must be of a certain type Example: Hiking is a
sport that is only possible in National Parks.
Some Values from Restrictions – Meaning: At least one Fig.2. Tourism Ontology
value of the property must be of the property must be of a The Concepts such as accessibility, entrance_fees,
certain type example: A National Park is an urban area that
opening_days, opening_hours, time_needed are also added.
has at least one Campground and offers at least one Hiking
The concept Wellness is added for the users who will be
opportunity.
interested in Ayurvedic treatment or Yoga. The details of
hasValueRestrictions-Meaning: At least one of the values fitness centres are added for those who go for Gym regularly.
of the property is a certain value. Example: A part of The relation among concepts were expressed by the properties
Coimbatore is a destination where one of the values of the to model the ontology.The figure 3 below shows the core
ispartof property Coimbatore. concepts of tourism ontology and table 1 shows the

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description of main classes in tourism ontology. The figure 4
shows the properties used in the tourism ontology.

Fig.4.The Properties of Tourism Ontology.
Fig.3. The concepts of Travel Ontology
From the point of application, the classes cannot exist
Table 1 . Description of main classes independently and they are related to one another. An interest
S.No. Class Description spot must be of interest to some tourist. (i.e. hasinterestof
Tourister is the visitor. All the constraints are some Tour). The tourist should have some accommodation
based on the tourist preferences. All the (i.e. hasaccomodationof some Tourister). Depending upon the
1 Tourister classes and subclasses are related to the
affordability for the accommodation by the tourist, the
Tourister.
accommodation is further classified as Low, Medium and
The places of interest which the tourist visits, High. Example, “accomodatein some Medium”. The Fig.5.
having three subclasses –
History_Heritage_Archaelogical, Nature and
below shows the Axiom of “accomodatein some Medium” and
Spiritual. History_Heritage_Archaelogical “accomodatein some High”.
consists of six subclasses namely
ArchaelogicalTemple, ArtGallery, Fort,
2 InterestSpot Palace, Memorial and Monument.
Nature consists of six subclasses -
BotanicalGarden, Beaches, Hill Stations,
WildLifeSanctuary, WildlifeZoologicalPark
and WaterFalls.
Spiritual consists of four subclasses -
Temples, Church, Mosque and Ashrams.
The places providing accommodation service
having seven subclasses – BudgetHotels,
3 Accommodation DeluxeHotels, Resorts, GuestHouse,
BoatHouse, Cottage and StarHotels.

This class is about the hospitals and health. It
consists of seven subclasses namely
4 Wellness GovenmentHospital, MultispecialityHospital, Fig.5. Axioms of Accommodation
Pharmacy, Spa, AyurvedicCentre,
YogaCenter, and FitnessRoom.
This informs about Leisure activities or
services, having five subclasses - Activity, As per our objective our main focus is on 3 questions and the
5 Leisure solutions are given below.
Nightlife, AmusementPark, Culture and
Shopping.
It provides means of transport to the tourist. It 1) If the tourist X is interested to visit a Nature spot,
6 Transportation has five subclasses and they are Air, Bus,
Rail, Car and Taxi. Hillstation, then X has the choice to go to Ooty,
Kodaikanal, Yercaud, Yelagiri and Kotagiri. Fig.6.
shows the result of the query.

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Fig.6. Query result Fig.8. Query result for Accommodation

2) The concepts such as tourist spots, accommodation, A tourist spot ThanjavurMarathaMarvels is a palace and also
activities and transportation with the tourist are can view as ArtGallery. Similarly some temples are of
mapped by means of object property [hasinterestof], archaeological importance and also attract tourist as a
[accomodatein], [hasactivity] and [transportby]. worshipping temple. E.g.Vaigundaperumal temple built by
Example: The interest spot hill station, Ooty is related Pallava dynasty exhibits the archaeological importance and
with the tourist as “hasinterestof some Tourister”. also has deities worshipped by people and is a spiritual spot.
The Fig.7. Shows the mapping of activities, Such diversity in tourist spots can be interpreted by multiple
transportation and accommodation using OntoGraf. tourism resources. This is especially helpful when two or more
people of different choices decide a destination together.
Vaigundaperumal temple is given as subclass of
Archaeological spot and is related to the subclass Temple of
Class Spiritual. Thus, multidiversity in tourism is handled for
the delicate retrieval of tourism information.
Some tourist spots are in cities and in suburbans. The tourist
spots in suburbans are linked to the nearest cities as point of
reference in the ontology. In TOTN, we have six point of
reference. For example, the Hillstation, Yercaud is linked to
the nearest city Salem for accommodation and transportation.
So all the answers from the system concerning distance are
measured from the point of reference. And the point of
reference will be the nearest city from an interest spot.
Some interest spots like Wildlife Zoological Spots will be
opened for some opening hours and has some working days.
Fees such as entrance fee, camera fee will also be a parameter
for the tourist to visit that place. Properties such as
have_entrance_fee, have_camera_fee, are_open_on, and
are_open_from_to are assigned. The other parameters the time
Fig.7. Mapping of Classes using OntoGraf. it takes for the user to get to the point of interest, average time
to see the place and come back to the place are also added.
3) The class Accommodation has subclasses namely
Budget Hotels, Deluxe Hotels, Star Hotels, Resorts, V. CONCLUSION:
Cottages etc. Based on the amount the tourist can This paper aimed at building a service of searching for the
spend for his accommodation, X can be perfect tourism package according to the user context. To do
accommodated in any one of the Hotels. The extent this, tourism ontology was formalized in TNTO ontology
of the accommodation expense X can spend is model by organising; interest spots, accommodation and
classified into Low (less than Rupees 500 per day), activities. Further, time variable i.e. the time it takes for the
Medium (Between Rupees 501 to 1000 per day) and user to get to the point of interest, average time to see the
High (More than Rupees 1001 per day). Fig.8 shows place and come back to the centre and amount of time spend
the result of the query for accommodation with the will be our future enhancements.
constraint that X can spend only Rs.501 to Rs. 1000.

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Information Science, 19,501-536. K.R.Ananthapadmanaban has completed his M.C.A
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completed M.Phil in Manomaniam Sundaranar
Model Driven Architecture and Ontology University, Thirunelveli in 2003. He has 10+ years of
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Kavouras M. Ontology Assisted Decision Making-A Dr.S.K.Srivatsa was born at Bangalore on 21 stJuly 1945.
Case Study in Trip Planning for Tourism, He received his Bachelor of Electronics and
Communication Engineering Degree (Honors) from
International Workshop on Semantic-based
Javadpur University (Securing First Rank and Two
Geographical Information Systems, Cyprus, Medals) and Master Degree in Electrical
November 3-4,2005. Communication Engineering (With Distinction) from
[13] Robert Barta, Christina Feilmayr, Christoph Grun, Indian Institute of Science and Ph.D also from Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore. In July 2005, he retired
Hannes Werthner. Covering the Semantic Space for
as professor of Electronics Engineering from Anna
Tourism-An Approach based on Modularized University. He taught twenty-eight different courses at
Ontologies, Proceeding of the Ist Workshop on the U.G. Level and 40 different courses at P.G. Level
Context, Information and Ontologies June 1, 2009, during the last 34years. He has functioned as a Member
of the Board of Studies in some Educational Institutions.
Heraklion Greece ACM 2009 ISBN: 978-1-60558-
His name is included in the Computer Society of India
528-4. database of Resource Professionals. He has received
[14] Waralak V. Siricharoen, “Using Ontologies for E- about a dozen awards. He has produced 34 PhDs. He is
Tourism”, Proceedings of 4th WSEAS/IASME the author of well over 500 publications.
International Conference on Engineerng Education,
Agios Nikolaos, Crete Island, Greece, July 24-
26,2007.
[15] Wei Wanag, Guosun Zeng, DongqiZhang, Yu Huang,
Yufeng Qiu, Xi aojun wang-“An Intelligent Ontology

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