Exploiting semantic web technologies for data interoperability

The tourism industry essentially is an information-based business where data interoperability exchange is necessary to create a more dynamic market and to foster cooperation [1]. A number of initiatives started in the past having the goal of gathering most of the participants to the electronic tourism market under a unique standard but none of these succeeded mostly due to their low flexibility and high adoption cost. This failure is also underlined by the fact that the majority of the eTourism market players are SMEs, for whose it is rather infeasible and costly unacceptable to modify their information systems to adapt them to a new standard. Moreover, experience shows that people are not so available to change their way of working and to accept new models. In this context, the European project HARMONISE proposed a solution based on the latest Semantic Web technologies which allows each partner to keep as much as possible his own "view of the world" without imposing any significant changes to its system in opposition to previous fixed standardisations. The main goal of the project was the creation of a network that reinforces data interoperability within the tourism industry. This was achieved by putting together the different market participants and the major domain experts in a guiding consortium which had the following tasks: - To compose an enlarged task force on tourism standards interoperability which allows the entrance of new users/partners, based on minimal rules; - To identify a minimal set of common concepts in the tourism domain as a starting point for developing a shared, conceptual reference schema, the so called Interoperable Minimum Harmonise Ontology (IMHO); - To develop a reconciliation tool allowing the partners to keep their specific concepts and proprietary data formats and, simultaneously, carry out effective communication and interaction