STAR

Involved people: Anna Goy, Diego Magro

Tourist Web portals currently present in the Internet make the access to tourist information and services much easier, but we believe that equipping these services with problem solving capabilities would significantly improve their usefulness for the users. In particular, STAR (Smart Tourist Agenda Recommender) is a Web-based system which exploits a configuration engine to support the user in organizing a personalized tour in a given geographical area.

STAR’s reasoning mechanisms are based on a declarative representation of a generic agenda as a complex entity in which tourist items (e.g. buildings, restaurants, etc.) are the basic components and denote the corresponding activities (e.g. visits to buildings, lunch in a restaurant, etc.).

STAR exploits a configuration engine to help tourists in defining their agenda. STAR's configurator is based on the FPC framework (see Magro and Torasso 2003) which enables us to represent:

• the complex (i.e. configurable) components;

• the atomic components (the basic buildings blocks of the configurations);

• the components' features; the taxonomic relations between the classes of components;

• the partonomic relations between each complex component and its (sub)components;

• several kinds of constraints among the components.

For more information about this project, please contact

Diego Magro