IJADE FreeWalker – An Intelligent Ontology Agent-based Tourist Guiding System

Abstract

Recently, Semantic Web has received substantial attention from the research community. Semantic web aims to provide a new framework that can enable knowledge sharing and resuing. Semantic Web is a collection of web technologies that include a number of markup languages such as RDF, OWL and RDFS. These markup languages are used for modeling a domain ontology. Ontology is defined as “a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization”. By using ontology to model resources, humans and computers (software agents) can have a consensus on the resource structure. The use of these technologies allows the creation of a more effective web search system. In this book chapter, we modeled travel domain ontology by using Web Ontology Language (OWL). Instead of inviting an expert to model the ontology, we created the travel ontology by collecting and analyzing the structural information from a number of travel related websites. Besides, we implemented a tourist context-aware guiding system, iJADE FreeWalker, which is constructed by using Semantic Web technologies. iJADE FreeWalker integrates GPS, ontology and agent technologies to support location awareness for providing the precise navigation and classify the tourist information for the users. The system was tested on 30 novice users. 83% of the users felt that the system can help tourists find tourist information in Hong Kong. www.springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 Toby H.W. Lam and Dr. Raymond S.T. Lee T.H.W. Lam and Dr. R.S.T. Lee: iJADE FreeWalker – An Intelligent Ontology Agent-based Tourist Guiding System, Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) 72, 103–125 (2007)