Information Technology Reference
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for planes or trains, booking hotels, etc. The VTA Web service achieves its
functionality by aggregating Web services from other travel service providers.
Figure 9.1 provides an overview of this use case setting, and the following is
a list of the actors participating in this scenario:
•
Customer
: the end user who sends a trip-booking request to the VTA.
•
Tourism service providers
: commercial companies that provide specific
tourism services.
•
VTA
: the intermediary between the customer and the tourism service
providers. This provides tourism packages to customers by aggregating
the separate services of various tourism service providers.
Fig. 9.1.
Overview of the use of the VTA
9.1.2 Semantic Web Service Usage Tasks
Let us consider the following exemplary setting. A customer wants to take a
trip to a given location (e.g., from Innsbruck to Vienna) for a given period
of time (e.g., staying there from August 10 to August 15). The customer
sends a request to the VTA, which then has to build a package including
travel to/from Vienna and accommodation for all the nights spent in Vienna.
Clearly, the hotel has to be booked according to the flight (i.e., if the flight
arrives on August 9, then the hotel has to be booked from August 9).
In this context, the VTA should take care of locating the necessary tourism
service providers (e.g., suitable flight providers for the trip and hotels in
Vienna) and contact them. Finally, a suitable offer will be returned to the
customer and, upon acknowledgment, either the accommodation, the trans-
portation, both, or none will be booked. This booking requires some sort of
weak transaction between the invoked services. We assume that the available
e-tourism providers will be dynamically located by the VTA, with no need
for prior agreements, and that the business process of the VTA will be dy-
namically composed on the basis of the request received and the available
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