Efforts towards an open electronic commerce infrastructure for the tourism industry

This paper motivates the development of an open infrastructure to support electronic commerce for the tourism industry. Such an infrastructure is the objective of the OnTour project, involving representatives of all participants in the tourist service supply chain. In this paper we discuss unique aspects of service provisioning in the tourism industry, and demonstrate the need for a business process management infrastructure to manage customer-tailored requests in the context of highly dynamic networks of service providers. We also provide a brief outline of Aurora, a related research project aiming to provide a common infrastructure for network-centric applications.