Extended Decision Making in Tourism Information Systems

E-commerce initiatives show that tourism data is one of the most accessed data in the Web. The problem is that a high number of users is rather unexperienced in Web use. The handling of tourism information systems is often a complex and time consuming process for tourists. To satisfy the tourists expectations it is inevitable to support the tourist in travel planning and decision making. Most tourism information systems offer a variety of sharp query functionalities with some relaxation mechanisms but lack in providing vague results or alternatives. To meet the tourists interests and preferences this paper presents two methodological approaches to support the tourist. The first is the case-based reasoning approach, which gives tourists answers to "what is recommended" by deriving individual travel suggestions from previous cases stored in the knowledge base. The second is a visual approach through touristic maps, which give the tourist a good impression of "what is where" to decide which of the resulting objects is located best regarding the tourists needs and