Hannes Werthner

E-commerce and tourism

Travel and tourism are illustrating how e-commerce can change the structure of an industry---and in the process create new business opportunities.

Conceptual foundations for understanding smart tourism ecosystems

Using digital ecosystems and smart business networks as conceptual building blocks, this paper defines, describes and illustrates the idea of a smart tourism ecosystem (STE). It further draws on conceptualizations of smart technologies, smart cities and smart tourism to envision new ways in which value is created, exchanged and consumed in the STE. Technologies essential to the functioning of an STE are described and it is argued that data emerging from these technologies are the driver for new business models, interaction paradigms and even new species. Critical questions regarding the need for regulatory intervention and innovative research are raised.

Case base querying for travel planning recommendation.

This paper describes the general architecture and function of an intelligent recommendation system aimed at supporting a leisure traveller in the task of selecting a tourist destination, bundling a set of products and composing a plan for the travel. The system enables the user to identify his own destination and to personalize the travel by aggregating elementary items (additional locations to visit, services and activities). Case-Based Reasoning techniques enable the user to browse a repository of past travels and make possible the ranking of the elementary items included in a recommendation when these are selected from a catalogue. The system integrates data and information originating from external, already existent, tourist portals exploiting an XML-based mediator architecture, data mapping techniques, similarity-based retrieval and online analytical processing.

Harmonise: A Solution for Data Interoperability

Travel and tourism represents the leading application in b2c e-commerce, due to several reasons: tourism is an information business, it has a rather a long value chain, and since the 60s it represents a classical field of IT and network applications (i.e., computerized reservation systems / global distribution systems — CRS/GDS). Thus, this sector depends heavily on advanced Information Technologies solutions, and the characteristics of this marketplace lead to a crucial challenge: the strong need for interoperability between different information systems, allowing the flow of information in this complex value process. Data heterogeneity is a well known problem, and the existing practical approach to solve this problem is to write ad-hoc data interface programs for each pair of communicating systems. Experience shows that development and maintenance of these programs are expensive in terms of both time and money. This paper presents an alternative solution to the interoperability problem in the travel / tourism marketplace: the creation of a “harmonisation space” in which market players are enabled to exchange data without changing their own systems’ schemata.

Information and Communications Technologies in Tourism

Following a short introduction outlining the concept of electronic markets and the structure of the tourism industry respectively, we will briefly portray the status quo of electronic markets in this sector. In conjunction to this, the forseen technological developments, as well as possible architectures for the future tourism market and moreover their effect on the tourist industry will be discussed.

Covering the semantic space of tourism: an approach based on modularized ontologies

Personalized online tourism services play a crucial role for tourists. In order to deliver adequate information, a semantic matching between tourism services and user context is needed. In the phase of trip planning, the essential user context comprises primarily user preferences and interests, while during the trip location and time context are added. While being on the move, unexpected events might force tourists to completely reschedule their travel plan and look for alternatives. In order to facilitate semantic matching between alternative touristic sites and user context, a specific vocabulary for the tourism domain, user type, time and location is needed. We demonstrate in this paper that existing tourism ontologies can hardly fulfill this goal as they mainly focus on domain concepts. The goal of this paper is to provide an alternative approach for covering the semantic space of tourism through the integration of modularized ontologies, such as user, W3C Time or W3C Geo, that center around a core domain ontology for the tourism sector.

A Survey of B2B Methodologies and Technologies: From Business Models towards Deployment Artifacts

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and service-based information exchange can be observed. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise. On a technical level, the focus in software development is moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These transitions on both levels promise a market entry at lower costs and an easier adjustment to changing market conditions. Hence, an overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches emerged in the past targeting the area of B2B - these are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper, we provide a survey of the most promising ones at both levels and classify them using the open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Furthermore, we discuss how individual specifications on different levels fit together - starting from business models via business processes to artifacts ready for deployment

Future research issues in IT and tourism

The objective of this manifesto (as a result of the JITT workshop in June 2014) is to identify a list of pivotal research topics and issues in e-tourism. E-tourism can be seen as everything that happens electronically in the travel and tourism industry/experience; more formally it is defined as the design, implementation and application of IT and ecommerce solutions in the travel and tourism industry as well as the analysis of the impact of the respective technical and economic processes and market structures on all the involved actors and especially on the traveller’s experience. In tourism as an “information business”, Information Technology has always played an important role since the 1960s with the computerized reservation systems/global distribution systems; these were one of the first world-wide electronic networks. And since the beginning of the Web in the early 1990s, travel and tourism was and is a major application domain for Web-based services. As such, the domain is also a major driver of technological innovation. This manifesto provides guidelines on strategic research issues for the research community, but as such it is also conceived as a basis document for industry and policy makers.

An integrated simulation and optimization modelling environment for decision support

Abstract A general framework and a specific implementation of a software environment for model prototyping, simulation and optimization are presented. The integration of simulation and optimization, and the possibility of comparing experimental results under complete user control represent the central parts of the proposed approach. Optimization is performed by repetitive simulation runs under the control of an optimization method. The integration of simulation and optimization as well as the post processing facilities offer an effective support to the classical phases of the decision process: intelligence, design, and choice. The software is based on an object-oriented structure and encourages the user to develop his own hierarchy of model classes and experiments.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Recommender Systems

(2006). Introduction to the Special Issue: Recommender Systems. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 5-9.