Development of an Ontology of Tourist Attractions for Recommending Points of Interest in a Group Recommender System for Tourism

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, David Luís Correia da
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/24146
• topic: Point of interest; Recommendation system; Tourism; Ontology; Personality; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia

In recent years, the tourism industry has witnessed substantial growth, thanks to the pro liferation of digital technology and online platforms. Tourists now have greater access to information and the ability to make informed travel decisions. However, the abundance of available information often leaves tourists overwhelmed when selecting points of inter est (POI) that align with their preferences. Recommender Systems (RS) have emerged as a solution, personalising recommendations based on tourist behaviour, social networks, and contextual factors. To enhance RS efficacy, researchers have begun exploring the integration of psychological factors, such as personality traits. Yet, to meet the demands of modern tourists, a robust knowledge base, such as a tourist attractions ontology, is essential for seamless and rapid matching of tourist characteristics and preferences with available POI. With that in mind, this project aims to enhance a Group Recommender System (GRS) prototype, GrouPlanner, by creating a robust tourist attractions ontology. This ontology will facilitate rapid and accurate matching of points of interest with tourists’ character istics, including personality, preferences, and demographic data, ultimately improving POI recommendations. First, there needs to be an understanding of the personality of tourists and how it influences their choices when it comes to picking the best point of interest based on their personality. With that knowledge acquired, it is time to choose a way to represent this knowledge in the form of an ontology. In this project, the Protégé ontology editor was used to design the ontology and the rela tionships between the tourists’ personality and the points of interest. After designing the ontology, it had to be converted to a database so the Grouplanner system could access it. So, to do that, a solution was designed to integrate the designed ontology in a triple store data base, in this case, Apache Fuseki. With the database implemented, several tests were made to verify if the database would give the recommended points of interests based on the tourists’ preferences. This tests were later analysed.