Configurable EDI for Heterogeneous Tourism Information Systems based on XML

With the tremendous growth of the Web, a broad spectrum of tourism information is already distributed over various Web sites. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection it is inevitable to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. The integration of distributed data sources has great impact on the quality of tourism information systems and follows the trend not to implement further systems, but to extend and improve existing systems. Towards a comprehensive integration of tourism data it is important to establish flexible data interchange facilities at tourism information systems, thus allowing interchange of structured data with other tourism information systems. To do this, the approach presented in this paper separates knowledge about data structures and data formats from the file generation process. This knowledge is transformed into a meta data structure represented by XML document type definitions (DTDs). If changes of the data interchange specification are necessary, it is sufficient to update the corresponding meta data information within the XML DTDs. The implementation of the data interchange processor remains unchanged and therefore the administration effort is significantly reduced.