TripFromTV+: targeting personalized tourism to interactive digital TV viewers by social networking and semantic reasoning

Interactive Digital Television applications bring new value-added functionalities to viewers. In order to fight the current information overload, many of these applications offer personalization capabilities, by matching each viewer's preferences against the available resources. This paper describes TripFromTV+, an interactive application that provides cut-price tailor-made tourist packages by helping the viewer to decide what to do and what to visit during a trip. Different from the existing approaches, this application automatically infers the viewer's preferences from the kind of TV programs he/she enjoyed and from his/her activity in social networking sites, whose diffusion mechanisms are exploited to make the existing tourism offers known among the viewer's contacts. The paper shows how interactive TV applications can incorporate content from the Internet, by creating seamlessly integrated presentations that allow the viewer to have the advantages of the network capabilities in the TV environment through domestic and mobile consumer devices.