Progress in Tourism Management Reviews

Interoperability and Ontology building is one of these technologies. Werthner and Klein 
(1999) defined interoperability as the provision of a well defined and end-to-end service 
which is in a consistent and predictable way. This generally covers not merely technical 
features but also in the case of electronic market environments, contractual features and a 
set of institutional rules. Staab and Werthner (2002) stated that interoperability is a major 
technical issue Interoperability offers a realistic alternative to standardisation, as many of the 
initiatives to establish global standards in tourism have failed to be widely accepted. This is 
due to the lack of flexibility of the standardisation process which requires every detail of the 
exchanged messages, include all the technical details depending on the communication 
mechanism being committed among all the communication partners, resulting to a high effort 
for defining and maintaining such standards (Fodor & Werthner, 2005). Interoperability 
enables partners to interact electronically with each other by the most convenient method 
and to deliver the right information at the right time to the right user at the right cost. Using 
an ontology that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between 
those concepts a mediator software system (such as Harmonise) effectively “translates” 
partners’ data and allows them to communicate electronically. Jakkilinki, Georgievski, and 
Sharda (2007) proposed an ontology-based eTourism Planner - AuSTO that enables users to 
create itinerary in one single application by this intelligent tool that builds on semantic web 
technologies. Similarly, Maedche and Staab (2002; 2003) showed that semantic web 
technologies can be used for tourism information systems to provide useful information on 
text and graphics, as well as generating a semantic description that is interpretable by 
machines. The OntoMat-Service, introduced by Agarwal, Handschuh and Staab (2003), can 
embed the process of web service discovery. Travellers thus no longer need to search 
information among millions of websites to grab the desire information. To the degree that 
tourism organizations need to interact dynamically with partners to develop and deliver 
tourism products, interoperability will be critical for their ability to work efficiently with others.