COSIMA – Preference Based Search Technology in Tourism

Today there are still a lot of people preferring to consult a human employee in a travel agency instead of using the internet for booking or organizing a travel. Technical problems, incomprehensible interfaces, and insufficient search engines are part of that problem. With the interplay and adjustment of several advanced, preference driven middleware components we achieve to automate skills that so far could be executed only by a human employee in a travel agency. Our search engines Preference XPath and Preference SQL deliver best alternatives, if there is no perfect match. It is possible to distinguish between hard and soft constraints like a human vendor would do. The Preference Presenter implements a smart and sales psychology based presentation of search results, supporting various human sales strategies; the Preference Repository provides the management of situated long-term preferences. A novel query rewriting approach enables the smart combination of single preferences, e.g. the category of a hotel, with global preferences like the overall prize for the whole journey enabling a deep personalized packaging of travels. The key technologies for this breakthrough are based on preferences modeled as strict partial orders. Our first advanced prototype COSIMA is promising.