Developing and utilizing ontology of golf based on the open travel alliance golf messages

Abstract

While the vision of the Semantic Web is an extremely appealing one, its success depends not only on development of new ontologies that represent various aspects of the world. Pragmatic view suggests that such activities have to go hand-in-hand with facilitating support for existing domain-specific real-world standards. One of such interesting standards that is systematically gaining popularity in the travel industry, is the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) messaging. Specifically, the OTA standardizes the way that businesses in the travel industry can communicate with each other. The aim of this chapter is to outline our efforts leading toward (re)engineering an ontology of golf (understood as a leisurely activity) anchored in the OTA golf messaging specification. Furthermore we discuss how such ontology could be used in a Travel Support System. Here, in addition to general scenarios, details concerning implementation of needed translators are presented. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.