Developing E-tourism services

Abstract

The SPICE platform simplifies the creation, testing and deployment of customized, personalized and context-aware mobile services. This opens up new prospects for E-tourism services, which give business travellers and tourists a more flexible access to booking services, information and other tourist support. E-tourism services allow for more flexibility and an improved travelling experience. This master's thesis presents a modified scenario based on a study of the E-tourism scenario defined in the SPICE project. It also presents service ontologies, which can be used by a service discovery facility to create complex service components based on a search through the service's parameters. The scenario provides the foundation for a description of two new E-tourism services, a restaurant service and a train service. The restaurant example service has been implemented and demonstrated. This service was based on SPICE principles, and it demonstrates a SPICE E-tourism service based on service platforms that exist today. The development of the service was carried out following the scenario-based approach defined in the SPICE project. Much work remains before the service serves as a complete SPICE E-tourism service, and this thesis has suggested several possible extensions and future areas of work. The train service is thoroughly described through an overview of the system specification and through an outline of needed components and enablers. This description can be used in a future implementation of the service.