Using Ontologies and Formal Concept Analysis to Integrate Heterogeneous Tourism Information

This paper presents an ontology-based approach and a formal concept analysis (FCA) approach to integrating heterogeneous tourism information for online tour planning. Two ontologies, an ontology for tourists and an ontology for tourism information providers, are developed with respect to their own perspective. The ontology for tourists is developed from the tourism literature. The ontology for tourism information providers is developed by integrating heterogeneous online tourism information using a FCA approach. The two ontologies are then mapped using the FCA and Bayesian analysis to evaluate tourists' preferences against information published by tourism information providers. An example of planning a tour to New York City is used to illustrate the proposed ontology approach. An analytic hierarchy process is used to rank the tourism attractions suggested by the ontology and FCA-based approaches.