A semantic portal for the tourism and hospitality industry: its design, use and acceptance

A 'Semantic Portal' is similar to a traditional cyberspace portal, except that web resources are indexed using a rich domain ontology (a specification of key domain concepts) as opposed to, for example, a list of keywords. 'AcOntoWeb' (Accommodation Onto the Web) was originally designed as a website (and web services) package, customised for accommodation enterprises within the T&H sector. It has now been implemented as a semantic portal and, in this paper, we provide an overview of the portal, with an emphasis on cross-portal ontology integration and its powerful query processing capabilities. A survey, assessing the willingness of Australian accommodation enterprise operators to use this new technology, is also presented.