A Software Product Line Approach To Ontology-Based Recommendations In E-Tourism Systems

ABSTRACT

This study tackles two concerns of developers of Tourism Information Systems (TIS). First is the

need for more dependable recommendation services due to the intangible nature of the tourism

product where it is impossible for customers to physically evaluate the services on offer prior to

practical experience. Second is the need to manage dynamic user requirements in tourism due to

the advent of new technologies such as the semantic web and mobile computing such that etourism

systems (TIS) can evolve proactively with emerging user needs at minimal time and

development cost without performance tradeoffs.

However, TIS have very predictable characteristics and are functionally identical in most cases

with minimal variations which make them attractive for software product line development. The

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) paradigm enables the strategic and systematic reuse

of common core assets in the development of a family of software products that share some

degree of commonality in order to realise a significant improvement in the cost and time of

development. Hence, this thesis introduces a novel and systematic approach, called Product Line

for Ontology-based Tourism Recommendation (PLONTOREC), a special approach focusing on

the creation of variants of TIS products within a product line. PLONTOREC tackles the

aforementioned problems in an engineering-like way by hybridizing concepts from ontology

engineering and software product line engineering. The approach is a systematic process model

consisting of product line management, ontology engineering, domain engineering, and

application engineering. The unique feature of PLONTOREC is that it allows common TIS

product requirements to be defined, commonalities and differences of content in TIS product

variants to be planned and limited in advance using a conceptual model, and variant TIS products

to be created according to a construction specification. We demonstrated the novelty in this

approach using a case study of product line development of e-tourism systems for three countries in the West-African Region of Africa.