Improving tourism information search and retrieval

The research described in this paper tries to bridge the existing gap between the tourism domain and user queries support in travel planning. The search engine proposed is based on a semantic model which allows defining a query language that is flexible and robust to changes in the tourism data model. This is critical as new tourism products, services and experiences are constantly emerging and the information needed to describe them varies considerably from one item to another. The search engine supports specifying customizable constraints and two aspects generally not considered in current travel planning online sites: nested sorting of the results and possibility to customize the amount and type of information to be retrieved about a tourism resource.