GENTE: An Ontology to Represent Users in the Tourism Context

Abstract

User-centric applications have recently gained popularity in particular in the tourism domain, in order to satisfy the individual needs of users and to provide personalized information. In turn, there is a need on modeling user profiles, considering different aspects of the information related to the user himself and his context. However, there is a lack of standardization to represent such information. The Semantic Web seems to be a clear solution for the formal representation of this knowledge, due to its capacity for organization and reasoning, in particular through ontologies. There are works that propose ontologies to model the user profile, but only cover partial aspects of the information required and are only applicable to specific applications, they do not propose a generalized user profile model applicable to the domain of tourism. This work proposes the development of GENTE ontology, a GENeral ontology for Tourism Environments, that represents the different dimensions of the information related to users and their context. In addition, techniques to infer characteristics, preferences, interests, and behaviors of users, from their social networks are proposed and developed.