Homogeneous EDI Between Heterogeneous Web-based Tourism Information Systems

During the last years the tourism industry realized the potential of Web-based tourism information systems (TIS) to increase the competitiveness by providing individual and specialized information about tourism objects. This leaded to a broad spectrum of tourism information systems distributed over various Web sites. But the described situation is not really satisfying for the users of such systems, the tourists, which required flexible and easy-to-use search functionalities. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection on the one hand and to provide adequate search functionalities on the other hand, 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. Beside comprehensive integration of tourism data, for tourists simultaneous availability and access to distributed tourism information systems supported by a generic and universally valid client application is desirable. In this paper an adapter concept is introduced which allows uniform and homogenous data interchange between a Web-based client application and several distributed heterogeneous tourism information systems. Moreover, data interchange between different TIS server applications is supported. The key advantage of this concept is that both the client adapter and the server adapter are designed as add-on modules and therefore their installation causes only low adaptation effort concerning existing applications.