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Etourplan: a Knowledge-Based Tourist Route and Activity Planner

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Etourplan: a Knowledge-Based Tourist Route and Activity Planner eTourPlan: A Knowledge-Based Tourist Route and Activity Planner by Tshering Dema Bachelor of Computer Science, Kanglung College, University of Delhi, 2004 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master of Computer Science In the Graduate Academic Unit of Computer Science Supervisor(s): Harold Boley, Ph.D., Computer Science Przemyslaw Rafal Pochec, Ph.D., Computer Science Examining Board: Gerhard Dueck, Ph.D, Computer Science, Chair Bruce Spencer, Ph.D, Computer Science Yevgen Biletskiy, Ph. D, Electrical and Computer Engineering This thesis is accepted Dean of Graduate Studies THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK September 2008 c Tshering Dema, 2008 Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my loving parents. ii Abstract Tourism is the world’s largest and fastest growing industry. There are conventional tourism service providers which are competitively trying to provide the best travel ser- vices to customers based on their interests. The Semantic Web is a major endeavour to enhance the Web by enriching its content with semantic (meta)data that can be pro- cessed by inference-enabled Web applications. eTourism is a good candidate for such enrichment, since it is an information-based business. As with any such business, pro- viding the relevant information for the consumer means a better end product. Thus, providing a well-structured and comprehensive Knowledge Base (KB) for consulting will bolster the eTourism business. In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a KB consisting of tourism domain-specific information. Our KB stores facts about Bhutan, which are structured by a light-weight ontology (adapted from the Harmonise eTourism ontology) and used by partonomy rules that encode the geographical parti- tioning of regions and provide a basis for activity search capabilities. On top of these, planning rules are applied to deduce recommendations of routes, activities (attrac- tions and events), and accommodations. This thesis also discusses transferring Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) concepts for semantically describing persons or organizations, to tourist-entity profiles. The FOAF-like Harmonise relation “relatedTo” between tourist entities is used to chain through provinces and attraction profiles, hence to provide attraction-centric recommendations. This prototype, eTourPlan, an eTourism planner using Semantic Web techniques has been implemented in RuleML/POSL. Results of running eTourPlan in the prototype RuleML engine OO jDREW are reported. iii Acknowledgements My graduate study experience in UNB has been fruitful with the motivation and guidance from many people. Firstly, I would like to extend my heartiest gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Harold Boley and Dr. Przemyslaw Rafal Pochec, for their invaluable insights and continuous support throughout the graduate program. My special thanks go to the OO jDREW Open Source Project, mainly Ben Craig, for his continued technical support. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Bruce Spencer, Dr. Gerhard Dueck, and Dr. Yevgen Biletskiy, for taking time from their busy schedules to read my thesis. I would like to thank Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), for the funding and the scholarship offered through the Strengthening Support for Education in Bhutan (SSEB) Project and the Royal Government of Bhutan for selecting me as a candidate. My immense gratitude also go to the Bhutan Project Staff for their kindness and support, which made my whole stay in Canada a wonderful one. Lastly, I would like to thank all my friends who have helped me a lot and my parents for their love and prayers. iv Table of Contents Dedication ii Abstract iii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents viii List of Tables ix List of Figures xi Acronyms xii 1 Introduction 1 1.1Overview................................... 2 1.2ThesisObjectivesandMethodology.................... 4 1.3ThesisOrganization............................. 4 2 Background 6 2.1TourPlannerandRecommenderSystems................. 6 2.2TheSemanticWeb............................. 9 2.2.1 Metadata.............................. 10 2.2.2 ResourceDescriptionFramework................. 11 2.3FriendOfAFriend............................. 12 v 2.4TheHarmoniseOntology.......................... 12 2.5SemanticeTourismPrototype....................... 13 3 Rule Languages and Tools 17 3.1RuleLanguages............................... 17 3.1.1 RuleMarkupLanguage....................... 18 3.1.2 Positional-SlottedLanguage.................... 19 3.2AdaptationoftheRuleEngineOOjDREW............... 19 3.2.1 BasicOOjDREW......................... 20 3.2.2 VariousArchitecturesofOOjDREW............... 21 3.2.2.1 IntegrationofOOjDREWBUandTD........ 21 3.2.2.2 Top-DownFindAllSolutions.............. 22 4 Knowledge Base Design: Ontology and Facts 23 4.1OntologyDesign.............................. 23 4.2OntologyandFOAF-likeProfileDescriptionsofeTourPlan....... 24 4.2.1 ProvinceProfile........................... 25 4.2.2 EventsClass............................. 27 4.2.3 Attractions Class .......................... 29 4.2.4 AccommodationsClass....................... 30 5 Knowledge Base Design: Rules 32 5.1 Auxiliary Rules . .............................. 34 5.1.1 Partonomyrules.......................... 34 5.1.1.1 ClassificationofRegions................. 35 5.1.1.2 Domain-SpecificPartonomyRule............ 36 5.1.1.3 EnrichedPartonomyRulewithTypeDefinition.... 40 5.1.1.4 GeneralPartonomyRule................. 47 5.1.2 DistanceComputation....................... 50 vi 5.1.2.1 PrecomputationofAllRoutes.............. 50 5.1.2.2 ShortestPathComputation............... 54 5.2 Rule Subsystem for eTourPlan Subdomains ................ 56 5.2.1 RuleSystemforRoutePlanning.................. 56 5.2.1.1 SearchingRoutesBetweenProvinces.......... 56 5.2.1.2 System Route Planning based on Province Profiles . 59 5.2.1.3 RoutePlanningviaUser-PreferredProvinces..... 60 5.2.2 RuleSystemforActivityandAccommodationSearch...... 62 5.2.2.1 ParametricSearchforActivityDetails......... 62 5.2.2.2 ParametricSearchforAccommodationDetails..... 64 5.2.2.3 Search“N”ActivitiesataSpecificProvince...... 67 5.2.3 RuleSystemforLocation-CentricTravelRecommender..... 68 5.2.3.1 Location-Centric Tour (Via User-Preferred Provinces) 68 5.2.3.2 Location-CentricTour(System-Recommended).... 70 5.3RuleSystemoftheeTourPlanTravelPlanner.............. 71 5.3.1 eTourPlan Attraction-Only Planning ............... 73 5.3.2 eTourPlanEvent-CentricPlanning................ 76 6 eTourPlan And Its Evaluation on the Bhutan KB 81 6.1KeyOperationsofthePrototype..................... 82 6.2OOjDREWTDUserInterface...................... 83 6.3 Experimental Results under Typical Operations ............. 84 6.3.1 Searchoperations.......................... 84 6.3.1.1 SearchforProvinces................... 84 6.3.1.2 SearchforRoutesbetweenAnyTwoProvinces.... 86 6.3.1.3 SearchforActivities................... 88 6.3.1.4 SearchforAccommodations............... 90 6.3.1.5 ExecutionTimes..................... 92 vii 6.3.2 Location-CentricRecommendation................ 94 6.3.2.1 ExecutionTimes..................... 96 6.3.3 CompleteTravelPlanningOperation............... 98 6.3.3.1 Attraction-Only Planning ................ 98 6.3.3.2 ScenariosofEventPlanning............... 99 6.3.3.3 ExecutionTimes.....................108 7 Conclusion 110 7.1Contributions................................110 7.2FutureWork.................................111 References 117 Appendix A: Main Recommender and Planner Rule Sets 118 Appendix B: Profiles of Tourist Entities 126 Appendix C: Partonomy and Distance Computation KB 146 Appendix D: Auxiliary Rule Sets 161 Appendix E: RDFS Type Definitions 168 Vita viii List of Tables 2.1Touristtravelplanningmatrix....................... 7 6.1 Queries of different input/output modes for Province search ...... 85 6.2ProvincesearchresultofQuery1 ..................... 86 6.3 Query mode(input/output) for Route search ............... 87 6.4RoutesearchresultforQuery1 ...................... 87 6.5 Queries of different input/output modes for Activity search ....... 88 6.6ActivitysearchresultofQuery4 ..................... 89 6.7 Queries of different input/output modes for Accommodation search . 91 6.8AccommodationsearchresultofQuery4................. 93 6.9 Queries of different input/output modes for Recommendation) ..... 95 6.10Location-centricrecommendationbythesystem............. 96 6.11Location-centricrecommendationforuser-preferredProvinces..... 97 6.12 Queries of different input/output modes for Travel Planning ...... 99 6.13 Attraction-only travel result ........................101 6.14 Execution times for Attraction-only Planning ..............101 6.15Event-Centrictravelresults........................104 6.16Evaluationofevent-centrictravelresults.................105 6.17Evaluationofevent-centrictravelresults.................105 6.18Evaluationofevent-centrictravelresults.................109 6.19ExecutiontimesforEvent-centricPlanning................109 ix List of Figures 3.1Top-DownFindAllSolutions........................ 22 4.1TherelationbetweenprovincesintheKB................ 26 4.2Eventsclass(fullversioninAppendixE)................. 28 4.3 Attractions class (full version in Appendix E) .............. 29 4.4Accommodationsclass........................... 31 5.1Thetop-levelarchitectureoftheeTourPlan................ 33 5.2 Subparts of a Country ........................... 36 5.3ExcerptofthepartonomyofBhutan................... 37 5.4Connectedgraphfordistancecomputation................ 51 5.5RoadmapofBhutan(Source:DepartmentofTourism,Bhutan)....
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