Recommendation Technology

To develop recommendations, Suggesto® uses Case Based Reasoning (CBR) Technology. CBR is a problem solving methodology that faces a new problem retrieving a past already solved similar case, and then uses that for solving the current one.

In Suggesto® Travel recommender, completed travel plans are stored in the Case Base. The system memorizes them as good examples. During a user's travel recommendation session, the system retrieves cases similar to the one being processed. The similarity function uses all the information coming in, including current and historic user and travel characteristics. This leads to highly personalized results!

Interaction technology helps to refine a user's query that has not returned a manageable set of items. A query fails when it returns either too many or no items.

If a user's request returns no results, Suggesto® tells which conditions cannot be satisfied and gives suggestions on how to refine it in order to obtain some results. Vice versa, if a user's request returns too many results, the system suggests ways of refining it in order to obtain a reasonable and manageable number of results.

Thus, on the one hand, Suggesto® avoids that the user leaves the site due to unsatisfactory search results and, on the other, it ensures that the user doesn't get overloaded with too many search results.

Ranking technology sorts suitable items from a catalogue and presents candidate products (hotels, packages, events...) based on the user's input preferences and on other users' satisfaction on similar trips. Ranking can be applied to complete travels as well as to single travel items, e.g. destination, accommodation, etc. It is important to underline that this technology does not require a rating system (i.e. explicit judgments of tourists on a specific product) but is based on the actual choices made by others who have built a similar online travel plan (knowledge-based approach). However, if a rating system is available on your website, this one can be integrated with Suggesto® technology to ensure that the results also take into account this type of classification.

Mediator is a data integration system based on XML that provides a uniform view over different data sources. The electronic catalogue can be distributed across several databases, even if they have different structures. The Mediator collects heterogeneous data and makes it available in a uniform way.