SigTur/E-Destination: Ontology-based personalized recommendation of Tourism and Leisure Activities

SigTur/E-Destination is a Web-based system that provides personalized recommendations of touristic activities in the region of Tarragona. The activities are properly classified and labeled according to a specific ontology, which guides the reasoning process. The recommender takes into account many different kinds of data: demographic information, travel motivations, the actions of the user on the system, the ratings provided by the user, the opinions of users with similar demographic characteristics or similar tastes, etc. The system has been fully designed and implemented in the Science and Technology Park of Tourism and Leisure. The paper presents a numerical evaluation of the correlation between the recommendations and the user's motivations, and a qualitative evaluation performed by end users.

► Discovering leisure activities that match the preferences of the tourists is hard.
► A Web-based recommender system is proposed, using a GIS and several AI techniques.
► The system considers personal interests and opinions from similar users.
► An ontology is used to semantically annotate leisure activities.
► The recommender system has been fully implemented and tested by real users.