12
ECOCLUB, Issue 92
3. A Dhillon and T Harnden, “How Coldplay's green hopes died in the arid soil of India,” Sunday Telegraph, 30 April 2006,
4. L Lohmann, ‘Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power,’ Development Dialogue
no.48, September 2006
5. ibid
6. M Grubb et al. ‘The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and Assessment’, Royal Institute for International Affairs, London, 1999
7. M Trexler, ‘A Stastically driven approach to offset-based GHG additionality determinations: What can we learn?”,
Sustainable Development and Policy Journal, forthcoming
8. M Higgins, ‘Carbon Neutral – Raising the Ante on Eco Tourism’, The New York Times, 10 December 2006,
12“BA Profits Up by 20%,” 24 May 2006, from the Business Travel Europe website
13. E Addkey, “Boom in Green Holidays as Ethical Travel Takes Off,” The Guardian, 17 July 2006
Handling Tourism Events with Collaboration Agents
by Dr. Josef Withalm & Dipl.-Ing Walter Wölfel*
Abstract
Finding the right partner, requires a large amount of effort, not just in one’s private life. Consequently, a solution to this problem in
the tourism industry is to build Virtual Networks in order to organize tourism events. To build these networks, organizations must
tackle two main challenges - concerning collaboration behavior, and tourism offers. Collaboration Agents, based on Semantic Web
and Ontology, could solve these challenges. An EU-project, ECOLEAD, endeavours to solve issues for Collaboration Networks.
Collaboration Agents, implemented by service providers on behalf of event organizers, would be able to roam the web, looking for
appropriate partners, and evaluating their collaboration and tourism offers.
Key Words: Agents, CNO (Collaborative Networked Organizations), Collaboration, ECOLEAD (European Collaborative
networked Organizations LEADership initiative), Ontology, Semantic Web.
Introduction
After years of experience both in software engineering and transportation/tourism it was decided that ECOLEAD (ECOLEAD, 2004)
would be highly beneficial for the tourism industry. Important results derived from ECOLEAD, conceptual as well as implemented,
would enable organizations to build Virtual Organizations (VOs). In particular, the fact that upcoming events forced tourism
organizations to build consortia, convinced us that ECOLEAD was the most appropriate approach to facilitate this event organizing
process.
Nevertheless due to our experiences with all the tourism stakeholders we were aware that there were big deficiencies regarding the
knowledge and usage of ICT. Therefore an attempt was made to exploit all the ECOLEAD results that were appropriate when
organizing events.
In particular, Semantic Web approaches were applied to enable tourism stakeholders to implement their offers on their established
websites or portals in two ways: 1) by identifying the collaboration abilities (which mainly comprise of business strategies, business
models and business processes), and 2) identifying the tourism offers (which comprise of their accommodation facilities, packages,
tickets).
Once the event organizers posted their offers on the web portal collaborative agents, it was possible to roam through tourism
stakeholders’ websites and evaluate the most suitable partners for the planned event.
The advantage of this solution is that tourism stakeholders are accustomed to providing a website, which is maintained / implemented
by a service provider. So, such a service provider could also enhance / maintain this website adorning it with the necessary
collaboration artifacts based on the ECOLEAD concepts.
Relation to Existing Theories and Work
In order to reach the projected goals the following theories / issues were taken into account. One option was to introduce Semantic
Webs, which could have a bright future in tourism. Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, already identified the
enormous potential inherent in this approach. Another option was to utilise Ontology that could, potentially, play an important role.
Before introducing the theory of Ontology the challenges that would be encountered by applying it to the area of collaborative
networks, were analysed.
Even though Ontology has proved useful in areas such as tourism, (see (RMSIG, 2006) & (Werthner, 2001)) the transformation to
collaborative networks raises some challenges. One of the most serious challenges is the application of Ontology to sociological
