Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway, and Tourist Republic are collaborating on the development of an intelligent trip planner that leverages semantic web technologies to reduce the amount of data users have to deal with when planning what generally are fairly major undertakings.

For example, say you want to attend a concert with friends somewhere in Europe -- not only do you have to get the tickets, but also book a flight, get a hotel, and deal with budget and date constraints. How can the semantic web help? For one thing, the interactive trip-planning tool will leverage DERI's BrowseRDF, which allows users easily navigate arbitrary RDF datasets using an exploration technique called faceted browsing.

"That lets you take an RDF data set and browse through it with faster browsing techniques, says John Breslin, research leader of the social software group at DERI. "Imagine you are looking at destinations around the world and then you choose Europe and then countries in Europe, and then sunny places, and then filter down from there. It uses a combination of auto filtering based on people's profiles and preferences and lets them tweak what they are looking at to reduce the amount of information they are looking at."

Key to the project will be converting Tourist Republic's dataset of various destinations to RDF format, as well as augment that with supplementary information people will want when planning a trip. For example, show a destination as well as what you can do there, what hotels are there, and so on. "We have a data set about places, people and information from Tourist Republic and we can supplement that with information from other public sites. To do that is where the semantic web comes in handy. We can augment the Tourist Republic data set with other public sources of information, such as dbPedia."

Tourist Republic currently store data on 100,000 destinations worldwide, and has released Touristr.com recently, which creates the platform to allow a wider re-groupment of location data. Jan Blanchard, CEO of Tourist Republic, says the company will also open some of the data generated by our application through an API.

Breslin notes that another aspect he expects will distinguish this trip planning site from others is the collaborative nature of it. "We're aiming to let people plan trips together and also try to build on the social network, so people, in terms of who they are connected to, can give and get more relevant recommendations on their trips." Ideally it will be able to leverage sources such as Yahoo's Fire Eagle, a way for a user to share his location with sites and services online, and the BrightKite location-based social network to add relevancy to recommendations, though he notes that "a lot of these sites are not critical mass just yet."

The combination of a smart recommendations engine with a powerful booking engine makes the proposition unique, says Blanchard. The company will generate revenue through a commission on bookings, and is looking to partner with a number a companies in the travel sector for this, he says. "Our priority is to partner with companies that gives us access to travel inventories. We will also seek partnerships with travel providers directly, travel social sites and tourist offices," he notes.

The $200,000 initiative is being funded under Enterprise Ireland's Innovation Partnership. Nearly all the team is in place now for moving forward, says Breslin. That includes DERI's Dr. Conor Hayes, who is an expert on recommendation systems, and James Donelan, who has been leading travel technology startups in Silicon Valley, as Tourist Republic's CTO.