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In last decade, we witness a significant increase in performance of mobile devices. In parallel, the growth of online data and services available on the Web make it become more and more emerging as a gold mine for the tourist guide application. With the inherent mobility and the widely supported Internet connectivity, tourist guide applications on smart phone are currently potential substitutes or supplements to travel book. However, it is a nightmare for tourists to select what are really interesting in a sheer volume of information while mobile devices have limited interactivity due to the inconvenient keyboard and small screen size regarding to computer. Therefore, the goal of our research is to develop a smart tool helping tourists find relevant travel information with minimum effort. This tool, implemented on Android platform, is the main component of STAAR (Semantic Tourist informAtion Access and Recommending), a system that supports request from heterogeneous environments. For the purpose, we describe our ontology formalized in RDFS/OWL to describe travel related information and to support integrating data from Linked data source. Through ontology manipulating web services, our Android application generates dynamic ontology-based user interfaces, allowing tourist to express their need in semantic queries with different levels of complexity, and then get access to relevant information.

The growth of online data and services on the Web make it become more and more emerging as an indispensable tool of traveling for the tourist industry. It is not denied that various approaches bring benefits for visitors in supporting them of searching tourist attractions, such us interested places for the visit, eating or staying. However, like a coin has two sides, too much information would be the difficulty for people when planning their journeys. Generally, tourists usually have problems when finding a satisfied accommodation without a reference to nearby restaurants, sights or event locations. In addition, travelers suffer from the information overload when they look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing the relevant and up-to-date information for the tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for the tourist guide information systems.This paper presents a semantic web approach for developing STAAR (Semantic Tourist informAtion Access and Recommending) which is a system that addresses the above mentioned issues. Specifically, it is described how an ontology is designed to represent the travel related information, and to support the integrating data from the open repositories. Relying on this ontology, we propose an algorithm for generating travel itinerary on the Web which is relevant to both criterions of the itinerary length and user interest.

Tourism is travel for leisure and recreational purposes. However, travelers suffer from information overload when they use the Internet to look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing the relevant information to tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for tourist guide information systems. This paper presents an ontology based approach for developing STAAR (Semantic Tourist information Access and Recommending), a system that addresses this problem. STAAR help tourist search information by providing a various semantic search feature in a mobile phone application. In addition, we propose an algorithm for recommending travel route relevant to both criterions: itinerary length and user interest.