Using TMT ontology in trust based medical tourism recommender system

Abstract

Medical tourism is a domain rich of data that are stored in many hundreds of data sources. Many of these sources should be used during the development of tourism information systems. That is why, it is very important to create a referential model that represents the medical tourism in Tunisia. The e-tourism ontology provides a way to achieve integration and interoperability through the use of shared vocabulary and meanings for terms with respect to other terms. In this paper, we will create an ontology as a very expressive hierarchy of categories, populating with information from Tunisian medical tourism providers' services that represent all concepts and relations of the medical tourism in Tunisia. This ontology will be integrated in a trust based recommender system to deal with the lack of semantic information in personalized recommendation in tourism domain.