A service-oriented travel portal and engineering platform

A service-oriented travel portal is proposed to realize a classic business model with SOA paradigm. It provides tourists with composite travel packages through dynamic composition among travel-related services from distributed providers and across business domains. Further, a devoted service-oriented engineering platform (SOEP) is reengineered and customized for travel portals based on authors’ previous work and a travel portal project’s use scenario. The platform is driven by four models: service meta-model, process model, business model and global information model. These models support semantic description and rational operations of the application, and facilitate travel service discovery, process execution and business to business integration. The travel portal provides a real SOA application and well-defined business and service cases to improve the platform. The SOEP provides a professional implementation environment for service-oriented travel portals, and it could be customized for the service-oriented systems of other industries using a similar framework and approaches to those presented in this article.