On the development of health tourism semantic web with its parallel engine

Abstract

Health tourism is an important source of income for Thailand. Health-oriented tourists need detailed information about available services and attractions. With the semantic web technology, these tourists can find satisfactory health tourism attractions. However, most current tourism ontologies are too general to serve health tourism. They focus on accommodations, attractions, transportation, and so on, but a specific ontology for health tourism does not exist. In this paper, we create a novel health tourism ontology and build a semantic web application around the domain using parallel technology. Real health tourism data were collected and studied for design purposes. We evaluated the resulting ontology in many dimensions: structure, expressiveness, design, granularity, reasoning, strictness, completeness, vocabulary correctness etc. The ontology represents a skeleton for general health tourism concepts. We used our ontology to build a semantic-web-based search application for health tourism in Hua Hin district of Thailand. Finally, we investigated the potential of parallelism to improve the semantic search performance, looking at both multicore and MapReduce cluster technologies.