On the internet, customers looking for a certain product may get a large number of offers from different vendors. The complexity of the e-commerce marketplace is further increased by changes in the offers over time.The customer is in the paradox situation that on one hand, mostly every information guiding the purchase decision is available. On the other hand, only a fraction of this information can be used because the existing e-commerce systems give few support in aggregating such informations (like reviews, tests etc.). The customer''s personal profile and requirements are not considered and so product queries are yielding only suboptimal results. Beyond it, the customer has to process the query results for a product "by hand" and - considering the limited time budget - may not find the optimal offer for a given product.

Generic Goal

The goal in the "Reisewissen" project is to develop a system, which evaluates the extensive and constantly changing range of articles for the customer. This "evaluation engine" increases the quality of a product query by not only considering the individual customer profile, but also domain specific knowledge. The domain specific knowledge will be described using ontologies and semantic web technologies.

The use case for the project comes from the e-tourism domain and covers searching and booking of hotels. The problem field described above is solved by developing a hotel evaluation engine. Our project is developing solutions for important use cases in the organisation of business travel:

• Optimization of the hotel selection
• Optimization of the complete business trip
• Enhanced quality of the travel service
• Time saving
• Reduction of indirect travel costs
• Significant reduction of direct travel costs

Funding

Reisewissen is funded by Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) and European Fonds for Regional Development (EFRE).