Daramola, Olawande
(2009)
A Software Product Line Approach to Ontology-based Recommendations in E-Tourism Systems.
PhD thesis, Covenant University.
Abstract
This study tackles two concerns of developers of Tourism Information Systems (TIS). First is the need for more dependable recommendation services due to the intangible nature of the tourism product where it is impossible for customers to physically evaluate the services on offer prior to practical experience. Second is the need to manage dynamic user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the semantic web and mobile computing such that etourism systems (TIS) can evolve proactively with emerging user needs at minimal time and
development cost without performance tradeoffs.
However, TIS have very predictable characteristics and are functionally identical in most cases with minimal variations which make them attractive for software product line development. The Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) paradigm enables the strategic and systematic reuse
of common core assets in the development of a family of software products that share some degree of commonality in order to realise a significant improvement in the cost and time of development. Hence, this thesis introduces a novel and systematic approach, called Product Line
for Ontology-based Tourism Recommendation (PLONTOREC), a special approach focusing on the creation of variants of TIS products within a product line. PLONTOREC tackles the
aforementioned problems in an engineering-like way by hybridizing concepts from ontology engineering and software product line engineering. The approach is a systematic process model consisting of product line management, ontology engineering, domain engineering, and application engineering. The unique feature of PLONTOREC is that it allows common TIS product requirements to be defined, commonalities and differences of content in TIS product
variants to be planned and limited in advance using a conceptual model, and variant TIS products to be created according to a construction specification. We demonstrated the novelty in this approach using a case study of product line development of e-tourism systems for three countries
in the West-African Region of Africa.
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