Ontology-Based Human-Computer Cloud for Decision Support: Architecture and Applications in Tourism

A variety of information processing and decision support tasks (especially in the context of smart city or smart tourist destination) rely both on the automated and human-based procedures. The article proposes a multi-layer cloud environment that, first, unifies various kinds of resources used by these information processing and decision-support scenarios (hardware, software, and human), and second, implements an ontology-based automatic service composition procedures that can be used to build ad hoc decision-support services for problems unknown in advance. The service composition is based on uniform description of all parts of the environment with a help of ontologies. The article describes the architecture and models of the novel human-computer cloud environment. It also describes several scenarios of decision support in tourism leveraging the proposed human-computer cloud concept.