An Ontology Based Tour Design Support to Extend Tourist's Cultural Interest

This article describes how culture-based tourism is a way to learn different cultures and gain appreciation of the inner value of heritages. However, to fully realize those values, visitors need extensive knowledge in several aspects that are scattered in domains; culture-based tourism thus does not gain much attention as other types of tourism. In this article, the authors propose a support system to assist in extracting and linking implicit values of cultural heritages for tourists. With a carefully designed ontology, cultural tourist sites are linked with aspects based on common properties to create a knowledge map to open visitors' viewpoint on cultural values. The usage experiments done by random samples reveal that the system helped participants to learn of unknown sites and to experience novelty connectable insight information of the heritages. The provided details of the generated results inspired those participants to consequently visit the sites following a story of their preferred aspect.