ETourism PROJECTS IN PROGRESS - We develop innovative technologies for tourism

ECTRL Solutions is member of the consortium of the european project HARMOSEARCH (www.harmosearch.org), aimed at the consolidation of an existing service mediation and harmonization of data for the european tourist market, called Harmonise, by adding capacity semantic and distributed search.

The current version of Harmonise, Harmonise 2.0, is an online service that helps to overcome the interoperability problems when exchanging data between heterogeneous data bases, allowing players to exchange data with others partners without the need to change the local data schema.

Objective of the HarmoSearch project - Harmonised Semantic Meta-Search in Distributed Heterogeneous Databases - is the analysis and development of a platform-independent search mechanism for tourism services in heterogeneous data bases, based on techniques of the areas semantic web and schema matching. Main research activities are the development of a (semi-) automatic mapping tool, which allows users to generate mappings without any technological knowledge or mapping skills, and a semantic meta-search component, based on a semantic registry, to address scientific issues like mapping of search queries and intelligent routing to appropriate data sources.

In this research ECTRL Solutions participate also as a founding member of HarmoNET Harmonisation Network for the Exchange of Travel and Tourism Information, www.harmonet.org). www.harmonet.org).

This research is funded by the Province of Trento under Article 5 of Provincial Law No 6 / 1999 for the financing of industrial research projects. Trip@dvice Mobile project aims to find innovative solutions and experimental development of new informatics services to be integrated into the platform SUGGESTO, available through mobile platform (such as mobile phones and PDAs), for the recommendation of touristic products. .

In particular, we designed and tested in an experimental way new services that allow tourist to be able to enjoy real-time tips (e.g. about destinations, accommodation, events, etc..) even during the journey itself, with the possibility to update the plan because of environmental changes or of different travel needs (e.g, variations due to change of plans or other adverse weather conditions).

For the development of this research ECTRL Solutions has strengthened collaboration with the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and with its academic partners, in particular prof. Francesco Ricci, University of Bolzano and prof. Hannes Werthner, University of Vienna, both persons of recognized international reputation in developing innovative technologies for e-commerce in tourism.