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Abstract:Travel and tourism represents the leading application in b2c e-commerce, due to several reasons: tourism is an information business, it has a rather a long value chain, and since the 60s it represents a classical field of IT and network applications (i.e., computerized reservation systems I global distribution systems -CRS/GDS). Thus, this sector depends heavily on advanced Information Technologies solutions, and the characteristics of this marketplace lead to a crucial challenge: the strong need for interoperability between different information systems, allowing the flow of information in this complex value process. Data heterogeneity is a well known problem, and the existing practical approach to solve this problem is to write ad-hoc data interface programs for each pair of communicating systems. Experience shows that development and maintenance of these programs are expensive in terms of both time and money. This paper presents an alternative solution to the interoperability problem in the travel/ tourism marketplace: the creation of a "harmonisation space" in which market players are enabled to exchange data without changing their own systems' schemata.

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A main obstacle to e-commerce is the well-known "interoperability problem." Different players have different views of the world, even in the same application field. This is particularly true in the travel and tourism e-market where IT has been applied for a long time, leading to a plethora of different information systems, each with its own data model and structure. In this article we describe the approach followed in "HARMO-TEN," a European project aimed at solve the data heterogeneity problem by setting up a "virtual interoperable network" and providing the participants with a technological infrastructure based on a shared ontology. This will allow exchanging information in a seamless way while keeping existing data models unchanged.

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