Desperately Searching for Travel Offers? Formulate Better Queries with Some Help from Linked Data
Jul 15, 2015 2545 views 
Various studies have reported on inefficiencies of existing travel search engines, and user frustration generated through hours of searching and browsing, often with no satisfactory results. Not only do the users fail to find the right offer in the myriad of websites, but they end up browsing through many offers that do not correspond to their criteria. The Semantic Web framework is a reasonable candidate to improve this. In this paper, we present a semantic travel offer search system named “RE-ONE (Relevance Engine-One)”. We especially highlight its ability to help users formulate better search queries. An example of a permitted query is in Croatia at the seaside where there is Vegetarian Restaurant. We conducted two experiments to evaluate the Query Auto-completion mechanism. The results showed that our system outperforms the Google Custom Search baseline. Queries freely conducted in RE-ONE are shown to be 63.4 % longer in terms of number of words and 27 % richer in terms of number of search criteria. RE-ONE supports better users’ query formulation process by giving suggestions in greater accordance with users’ idea flow.