The industry is making moves to improve the situation, and has formed a consortium called the Open Travel Alliance (OTA). The OTA is producing XML message specification schemas to be exchanged between the trading partners, including availability checking, booking, rental, reservation, query services, insurance. This will improve matters, but not every travel company's applications can be expected to produce and consume OTA-compliant messages.
The SATINE project developed a secure peer-to-peer network that enables peers to deploy their semantically-enriched travel Web services and allows others to discover these services semantically.
'The concept, 'semantic web services', is very important for the tourism industry since the industry is structured as a distributed environment, because of its nature, and tourism companies need to reach the services in this distributed environment,' says Dr Dogac. 'By introducing semantics to Web services, we have addressed the interoperability issue on the semantic level and constructed a peer-to-peer network that eases service discovery.'The project also developed mechanisms to enrich ebXML (e-business XML) registries through OWL-S ontologies to describe the Web service semantics. OWL itself is a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the Web. Ontologies are the vocabularies that allow machines to identify specific services or information. For example, a human operator would understand the term 'booking', but it needs to be defined in a special way for a machine to understand. "
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