Integrating Heterogeneous Tourism Information in TIScover - The MIRO-Web Approach

A broad spectrum of tourism information is already distributed over various web sites. However, a major problem for the tourist is to find these web sites and to deal with the differences concerning information presentation and information access. At the same time, it is not feasible to store every kind of information a tourist might be interested in at one web site neither in terms of storage costs nor and even more important in terms of maintenance overhead. Therefore, in the course of the ESPRIT project MIRO-Web the official Austrian tourism information and booking system TIScover is extended in order to federate multiple structured and semi-structured tourism information sources on the web. In particular, MIRO-Web supports a homogeneous view on these heterogeneous sources which can be either materialized or defined as virtual. On the basis of this view, appropriate query mechanisms as well as a web-based interface provide the user with a single point of access.