A Cultural Tourism Ontology for Lower Northern Thailand

Cultural Tourism is a problem-specific area of the tourism domain therefore being the subject of enquiries from prospective tourists. Keyword searching is usually a challenge to tourists, not well versed in structuring queries, and due to the ambiguity inherent in Internet searches, and the unique characteristics of tourism assets which vary, often significantly, from area to area. A semantic search is a key aspect of any information management solution for the unsophisticated end user. The concept of ontology comes into consideration because of its strength in resolving the unanbiguity of user’s search.This research introduces a cultural tourism ontology that enables users to search semantically to satisfy their particular interests. The evaluatin of the performance of the ontology in term of the correctness and of the data retrieval is measured by traditonal methods F-measure, precision and reall. The quality and effectiveness of the designed ontology was evaluated using OntoQA.