Technological Educational Institution of Patras,

Tourism has a rather long business value chain and Destination Management Systems (DMS) have revolutionized the ways that the travel and tourist industry operates. Current web-based DMS cannot interoperate with other systems and data sources, as they are heterogeneous. In particular, DMS are based on different Information Systems (viz. hardware and software platforms), but mainly they use different data for representing tourism products and services. Data heterogeneity is a well-known problem, which is solved by providing semantic reconciliation among the different systems, with respect to shared conceptual reference schema: the domain ontology. DMS is a perfect application area for Semantic Web technologies, since information dissemination and exchange are the key-backbones of the destination management. DMS should take advantage of semantic services, interoperability, ontologies and semantic annotation. The Semantic Web could offer more flexibility to DMS through the use of new emergent Semantic Web technologies such as ‘intelligent ’ software agents and annotation tools. In this paper we show how the Semantic Web technologies can be used for the next generation DMS. In addition, we propose an ontology for tourism destinations and we introduce the LA_DMS model