Meta-level Programming for Legacy TIS Integration

Abstract

The current pace for software revolutions is driving a key problem into the field of Tourism Information Systems (TISs): many TISs are or become legacy systems. The common view of legacy systems associates operational TISs to obsolete, old-fashioned systems. In contrast to this broad opinion, we discuss legacy TISs as a treasure for wider implementations. We focus on TIS interfaces and demonstrate, how Meta-level Programming (M1P) can be used to integrate them within new functional environments. Recent studies have pointed out that real-world IS processes can be extended with a meta-layer, which alleviates the masking of underlying interface complexity. Our paper concretely discusses the relevance of M1P for legacy TIS integration. We illustrate the problem of a legacy TIS with the migration of a traditional, large TIS towards ubiquitous access and its integration into modern environments (1). In the following, we shortly outline the power of M1P for TIS integration (2). The relevance of cognitive architectures for such knowledge based integration is the object of the subsequent section (3). We then undermine our propositions with a completed, fielded sample application in the domain of distributed TIS software agents (4). Our ongoing research (5) is finally outlined with early trends in the context of the World Hospitality Interface Standard (WHIS) and XML for the tourism industry. The general focus is on the strategic relevance of M1P for legacy TISs rather than on technical considerations.