Ontology-Based Database Approach for Handling Preferences - Data Warehousing Design and Advanced Engineering Applications - page 265

Figure 6. A fragment of the tourism ontology

IMPLEMENTING THE MODEL: THE
HOLLIDAY BOOKING CASE STUDY

satisfy Marc making sure that his preferences
are considered. Two preferences are identified
here: the room facilities ' standard ' and the cost
description ' cheap '.
The instantiation of our preference model for
this case study is described below. Firstly we give
a fragment of the tourism ontology correspond-
ing to the case study. Then we describe how we
express the preferences. Finally, the querying
process is outlined.

In order to illustrate our approach, let us consider
a research scientist, Marc, wants to book a hotel
room for his summer holidays. To do this, he uses
his favorite online holidays booking system. This
booking system manages a set of hotels dissemi-
nated over the world. These hotels offer various
leisure facilities and are rated according to the
international hotels rating standard ranging from
1 star hotels to 5 stars hotels. The number of stars
depends on various characteristics including the
level of comfort and the leisure facilities offered
by the hotel. The price of a room depends on the
category of the hotel and of the period. The book-
ing system uses an ontology about the tourism
domain. This ontology formally describes the
knowledge about the domain.
Marc would like to minimise the budget he
will spend for his holidays. He prefers living in
cheap hotels and he has a preference for standard
room facilities.
Regarding this situation, the objective is to

The Domain Ontology:
A Tourism Ontology

The Tourism Ontology defines the entities de-
scribing the accommodation and complementary
services usually offered by hotels. It defines enti-
ties such as rooms (categorised in single, double
and suite rooms), reservation, room facilities (e.g.,
TV, wifi), provision of meals (e.g., half board),
etc. Figure 6 gives a graphical representation of a
fragment of this ontology and Figure 7 describes
a set of its instances.
The ontology described previously is defined