Recent Research Projects

etPackaging  (November 2006 - March 2008)

Nowadays, more or less the complete Austrian tourism offer is available online. However, different services are often only available on different platforms and the customer is not supported in composing an individual journey, consisting of different services, comparable to a package tour. A complex search and booking process is the consequence. The objective of this project is to analyze and design a process for a dynamic bundling of tourism services, taking into consideration the requirements of all involved parties (customer, supplier and intermediary). Here, the integration of supplier-initiated and customer-initiated product bundles into one bundling process as well as the personalization of the bundling process is of high importance. 

The research activities conducted by FUB aim at designing, implementing and testing learning techniques for the adaptation of system behavior to user responses to system actions. System actions may be recommendations, requests for user preferences, or display of personalized information. To achieve these goals we shall first adjust and install recommender and search engine functionality on the main Austrian tourism web site. Then we shall design and initiate a series of experiments to analyze the users’ behavior vis-à-vis systematically varied system response. This will require the definition of a new model for interaction state representation and its implementation. Then we shall incorporate alternative methods of statistical learning into the test system. These methods will include Reinforcement Learning approaches to learning dialogue strategies and Bayesian methods to represent and reason on user preferences. 

Partners: ECCA  eTourism competence center Austria (Austria), TRC  tourism research center Krems (Austria), Österreich Werbung (Austria),   Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), WU Wien (Austria),  Donau-Universität Krems (Austria),  Europäische Reise-versicherung (Germany), Infoterm  International Information Centre for Terminology (Austria), Invent GmgH (Germany),  Raiffeisen Informatik RIT (Austria), Xploration GmbH (Austria)

European Tourist Destination Portal –  http://etd.ec3.at - (April 2004 to October 2005)

This new initiative was aimed at designing and developing a unique access point to all European National Travel Organizations web sites. This new multilingual (En, Fr, Ge, It, Sp and Pt ) web site  was intended to bring a better visibility to Europe as a unique and composite destination, and to provide a quicker search tool to select the most suitable information. The portal content is extracted from the (National Tourism Organization) NTOs web sites and data bases, and is integrated in the portal using the Harmonise semantic data-reconciliation tool. The user is supported by the portal trough a wide range of services, including, trip planning and product/service recommendation. The project was coordinated by EC3 (A), and the other partners was: TISCover (A), Siemens (A), Lixto (A) and ITC-irst (I). Overall budget 1.9 MEuro (eual to funding), and ITC-irst budget is 193.800 Euro. I participated to the project proposal preparation, the development of the project and I was member of the Advisory Board.

HarmoTen – http://www.harmo-ten.info – eTEN C510828 – (May 2004 – October 2005)

This project is a follow up of a previous project (Harmonise). The technologies developed in Harmonise, were here validated in 11 case studies in different European countries. This enabled us to further improve and engineer the technology and to design a viable business model for the service (data reconciliation and interoperability infrastructure). HarmoTen is funded by the EU, in the eTen programme. The project coordinator is EC3 (A), and the other partners are: IFITT (A), Umbria Region (I), Consorzio Pisa Ricerche (I), ITC-irst (I). The overall budget is 829.836 Euro. ITC-irst budget is  21.600 Euro.   I participated to the preparation of the proposal and now I’m participating to the project as ITC-irst responsible.

DieToRecs - http://dietorecs.itc.it – IST-2000-29474 (July 2001 to May 2004)

This project was aimed at developing and validating a recommender system for tourist destination decision-making. The DieToRecs recommender system  provides an interactive web-based tool capable of supporting the structured process of selecting a tourist destination and bundling a personalised trip plan. DieToRecs accesses and integrates, by using a mediator architecture, data managed by two existing tourist web portals (trentino.to tiscover.com). DieToRecs recommender was designed as an adaptive system, i.e., capable to adapt the dialogue process and the suggested products/services learning user's characteristics and preferences. System learning and adaptation was performed at each session level (short term) and collecting a memory of previous supported human/computer recommendation sessions. The dialogue is driven by an explicit model of the tourist destination selection. DieToRecs supports product aggregation for a given destination, letting the user to build a personalised dynamic package. Key technologies: XML, OLAP, Case-Based Reasoning, Adaptive User Interfaces, Web and Data Integration Architectures. I’m the Project Director and eCTRL is working in partnership with: TISCover A.G.(A); University of Vienna (A), University of Urbana Champaigh (USA), APT Trentino (I). Budget 1.5 Meuro.  I prepared the project proposal and coordinated the whole project as principal investigator.

eCommerce and Tourism – http://ectrl.itc.it (Jul. 2000 to Feb. 2004)

This was the strategic and foundational project of the  Electronic Commerce and Tourism Research Laboratory. The objective was to create a multidisciplinary approach towards IT and Tourism (in partnership between ITC-irst and University of Trento) and build up in Trento an international point of reference for IT&T. In the short term we have developed a new generation of web enabled intelligent tools (recommendation technologies) and built some real working prototypes (web based travel destination decision aid system and a mobile recommender system for service selection). In partnership with the Azienda di Promozione Turistica del Trentino we have developed a recommender system for touristic products/services information selection and travel planning. Seven researchers worked on this project. A first system prototype, called NutKing, has been available since 2002. NutKing is accessible at http://nutking.ectrldev.com/nutking/ and now this technology has been integrated in a product (Trip@dvice) available from www.ectrlsolution.com.  NutKing supports high user interactivity, exploiting intelligent query refinement and products scoring, learning preferences from past user interactions (collaborative filtering). A plan for economic exploitation of the technology is underway, and a new company is going to be established as a spin off. Budget 1.9 Meuro. I participated to the preparation of the project proposal and coordinated the ITC-irst unit as principal investigator.

Harmonise - http://www.harmonise.org - IST-2000-29329 (July 2001 to July 2003)

Although standardization initiatives (based on XML) have a long history in the field of tourism, with different levels of adoption and usage, the intended broad harmonisation of electronic markets has never been reached, due to the lack of flexibility and extensibility. Harmonise set up a co-ordinated initiative at European level, which has brought:

• Support a consensus process of the main European key actors, that composes an enlarged task force on Tourism Standards and interoperability; 
• Identification of a minimal set of concepts as a starting point for a mediating tourism reference model; 
• A software tool, based on ontology and semantic web technologies, that supports  a reconciliation process that allows the different partners to keep their specific ontology, data structure and formats, and at the same time carry out an effective interaction among them.