Future Smart-Organizations: A Virtual Tourism Enterprise

To remain competitive in the aggressive global market, Tourism industry and service providers face the necessity to strongly collaborate and share their expertise and resources, as well as their costs and risks. The paradigm of Virtual Enterprises (VEs) and smart organizations addresses the necessary base horizontal infrastructure needed to support such a collaboration framework. Designing a Web-based Tourism Information System (WTIS) as a virtual enterprise, requires the proper provision of: (1) enterprises inter-operation and task sharing, and (2) federated information management. Enterprises need to inter-operate, share the task execution, and collaborate towards the distributed processing and coordination of their joint activities. Furthermore, federated management of information is required in order to support their sharing and exchange of information, while preserving their autonomy and individual rights to proprietary information. These two aspects, strongly present within the recently initiated EC-funded 5FP project FETISH 1 , are addressed in this paper. The paper discusses the requirements and research challenges, and describes an innovative reference architecture for the WTIS, focusing on a novel horizontal infrastructure supporting the Virtual Tourism Enterprise. It further addresses how vertical value-added-services can be developed on top of this base WTIS infrastructure. In specific, the paper describes an example distributed business process for a value-added-service “booking a journey plan” through the WTIS, that both presents the role of a temporary VE in supporting this service, and addresses necessary subtasks to be executed by different VE enterprises.