Personalization of the search process in tourism [Elektronische Ressource] / Sven Döring

Informations

• Publié par: universitat_augsburg
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 27
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PERSONAL IZAT ION OF
THE SEARCH PROCESS
IN TOUR ISM
Doctoral Thesi s

Dipl .-Inf. Sven Döring
Faculty of Applied Co mputer Science
University of Augsburg
Doering@In formatik.Uni-Augsburg .de
© Copyr ight 2008. All r ights reserved. 2
Examiners: Prof. Dr. Werner Kießling
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Möl ler
Day of oral exam ination: 09.05 .20083
Abstra ct
The combination of trav el and touri sm represents the leading domain for application s in B2C
e-comm erce. Thus, it deserves high est attent ion. Since m ost people only have a ver y limited
nu mber of vaca tion days each y ear, they have l earned t o be more dem anding abou t their trips .
More and m ore they ask for bette r-per sonalized travel products inst ead of standard packages
design ed by tour ist operators. Due to insuffic ient search engines and the lack of personaliza-
tion, however, arranging a trip on current online tr avel portals is of ten not as easy as it should
be. Even f or rather s traightforward sc enarios, s earch ing and booking a s uit able travel package
can be tedious and might often take longer than 1 hour. In order to prov ide good sal es experi-
ences a nd custom-tailored produc ts similar to the ones co mpetent human travel agents c an of-
fer, a personalized search approach for online travel portals has been ov erdue for some time.
This thesis , therefore, presents a novel personalized search process de livering travel produc ts
exactly tailored to custo mers with respec t to their situat ions and pr efer ences .
In a first step, a nove l m odel for the search process in elec tron ic com merce will be intro-
duced . A deep p ersonalization o f the s earch wi ll be p rovided b y dividing t he proc ess in to four
stages, namely Preference Analys is & Modeling, Search Interface, Query Processing, and
Presentation. The m ain part of this thesis , wi ll then appl y the new mo del to the tour ism do-
m ain, i.e . each s tep of the sea rch wil l be examined in the con text o f tou rism. A situat ion mod-
el ad equate ly adjusted to the tourism domain wil l then provide each stage of the search pro-
cess wi th addi tiona l situat ional knowl edge. Based on this , several essential co mponents for a
domain spec ifi c search in tou rism wil l be introduced according ly: a new prefe rence construc-
tor dealing with typ ical pri ce-qua lity trad eoffs, a smart pref erence elicitation process support -
ing custo mers who have to find an optim al depa rtur e airport, the co mposition and evalua tion
of da tabase que ries support ing the interpla y of ind ividual and global preferenc es, and an ap-
propriate adapta tion of search interfa ce and produc t presentation . Moreove r, by us ing prefer-
ence search technolog ies as underlyi ng basis for the search itself, best alternatives can be de-
livered in case there i s no perfec t match.
Severa l nove l softwar e components for a personali zed search proce ss in tourism have come
Tinto exis tence i n the con text o f this thes is, e.g ., t he person ali zed protot ype COSIMA . The in -
terpla y of these co mponents with ex isting preferenc e components wil l be examined and eval-
uated by means of nu merous use ca se scena rios at the end of this work. It wi ll be demonstrat -
ed t hat by a proper c o mbination of these components, custo m-tailored t ravel products with re-
spec t to prefer ences and situa tions can be found and presented to the custo mer in an intui tive ,
fast and m ore co mfortable manner than before. 5
Ack nowledgments
This work would not have been possible wi thout the valu able suppo rt of several people I am
particularly gratefu l to. At t he c hair of databases and i nformation system s of the University of
Augsburg (Germany) m y doctoral adviser , Prof. Dr. Werner Kießling, prov ided m e wi th an
inspiring vi ew into a world ful l of preferences. I would like to thank him for his support and
good advice during m y research .
I am deepl y gratefu l for the incentive and jo yful work wi th m y colle agues in the department.
In particular , I would like to thank Stefan Hol land and Ste fan Fisch er for a smooth start into
the Preference World, Timotheus Preisinger , Ma rkus Endres , and Alfons Huhn for the good
cooperation during va rious projects . I am also espec ial ly grateful for the suppor t of Prof. Dr.
Bernhard Möl ler and Anna Schwartz .
The work at FORSIP, the Bava rian Research Cooperation for Situated , Individualized and
Personalized Hu man-Com puter Interaction, offered me insights into va rious interesting re-
search f ields. I would l ike to t hank all the people a t FORSIP, I had th e pleasure to work wi th.
Specia l thanks are due to Al ex Mango ld f or a last-minute, linguistic rev iew of m y work.
Finally, I am ver y grateful to Ste fanie Leis tner for he r support and pa tienc e.7
Contents
1 Introduction.......................................................................................................................9
2 Trave l Search in Tourism ..............................................................................................13
2.1 Customer's Experience with a Typical Trav el Portal.................................................13
2.2 An Overv iew of Existing Online Travel Portals........................................................16
2.2.1 Exped ia................................................................................................................17
2.2.2 Tr avelocity..........................................................................................................18
2.2.3 TUI .....................................................................................................................18
2.2.4 Tr aveltainm ent and '5vorFlug'.............................................................................19
2.2.5 Summ ary ...........................................................................................................20
2.3 Objectives of this Thesis ...........................................................................................21
3 Foundations of Prefer ences Rev isited............................................................................25
3.1 Modeling Preferenc es ...............................................................................................25
3.1.1 Base Pre es.................................................................................................27
3.1.2 Complex Prefe rences30
3.1.3 SV-Semantics......................................................................................................32
3.2 The Preference Framework .......................................................................................34
3.2.1 Pr efer ence Se arch ................................................................................................35
3.2.2 Si tuat ed Pre ference Mod el and Pr efer ence Repos ito ry........................................36
3.2.3 Personalized Presentat ion of Quer y Results........................................................37
4 Tailoring a Persona lized Search f or Tour ism ...............................................................39
4.1 Personalizat ion of the Sea rch P rocess in E-Com merce ..............................................39
4.1.1 Comm o n Prefer ences in Elect ronic Co m merce ...................................................39
4.1.2 Des ign Princip les f or a Personalized Search Proces s...........................................42
4.1.3 Search M odel .......................................................................................................43
4.2 Situat ion M odel ing for the Sea rch P rocess in Tourism45
4.2.1 Si tuat ed Ent ity- Relationship -Model for Tour ism ................................................46
4.2.2 Tourism-Rela ted Pr efer ence Repos ito ry .............................................................48
4.3 Tradeoff Preferenc e Const ructo r...............................................................................49
4.3.1 Def inition o f the Prefe rence Construc tor55
4.3.2 Complexity and Performance Considera tions ......................................................61
4.3.3 Quality Valuat ion ...............................................................................................62
4.4 Smart Preferenc e El icitat ion......................................................................................64
4.4.1 Pr efer ence E licitation Based on Information Int egration.....................................66
4.4.2 Smart Preferenc e El icitat ion in Conclusion.........................................................75
4.5 Advanced Preference Quer y Process ing ...................................................................76
4.5 .1 Pr efer ence Query Expansion Approach ...............................................................79
4.5 .2 Algorithm and Co mplexit y .................................................................................92
4.6 The Concepts in Retrospect.......................................................................................948
5 Prefe rence Based Co mponents for Touri sm..................................................................95
5.1 Histo ry of COSIMA ........................................................................