Creating Personalised Travel Brochures
- VIS, EVIS & ELVIS

Tim Lukins & Pete Edwards

The World Wide Web provides the business traveller/tourist with a vast online repository of information on destination cities, accommodation, entertainment, flights, etc.

Unfortunately, finding the information can take a considerable amount of time and energy. To address this problem, we have developed a series of software agents capable of searching for travel information and constructing online travel "brochures". The philosophy behind our approach was to develop the agents in an incremental manner, with each successive agent incorporating additional features.

Three systems have so far been developed (using Java):

VIS - Visitor Information System

• A simple extension to the Remora meta-search angine, which combines a destination query such as "New York" with groups of generic travel terms such as "hotel", "motel", "guest house" to create travel-specific queries. Five broad groups of terms are used to perform separate (category) searches for: accommodation, food & drink, sightseeing, entertainment, sport & recreation.
  
  The search engine results are assembled into a simple Web page "brochure" organised under these headings. Once a query has been submitted to the VIS server (via an applet), the user is free to disconnect from the site; an email message is sent to advise on the location of the completed brochure.

EVIS - Enhanced Visitor Information System

• An enhanced applet allows the user to specify which brochure sections they require, and to provide additional information such as departure airport, dates of travel. EVIS only performs those category searches required to assemble the requested brochure sections. Once the search engine results have been obtained, the URLs are checked by the agent to determine if they still exist, and if so, whether the page content is relevant; only relevant pages are included in the assembled brochure. Relevance is assessed by extracting terms from the Web documents, and comparing these against the sets of generic travel terms, to compute a numeric estimate.
  
  In addition, EVIS employs an AUTO-CGI component to interact with sites which provide hotel/flight information using details of the user's trip, e.g. www.marriott.com.

ELVIS - Enhanced Learning Visitor Information System

• The addition of a learning capability allows users to give feedback on the quality of brochure entries. This feedback is used to acquire a profile of user preferences. This user-profile is employed (together with the generic travel terms) when assessing page relevance.

Click on the icons above for illustrative screendumps. WARNING: Images may take some time to download.

Registered users can click here to visit ELVIS. To enquire about registration, contact: pedwards@csd.abdn.ac.uk

Publications:

• Exploiting Learning Technologies for World Wide Web Agents
  IEE Colloquium on Intelligent World Wide Web Agents, Digest No: 97/118, IEE, Savoy Place, London, 3/1 - 3/7, 1997.
  P Edwards, C L Green, P C Lockier & T C Lukins

Funding:

Internal Undergraduate Project.