Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

To better publish geographical information on the Web, it is important to capture how Web technologies are changing. For a recent decade, Semantic Web has been developed by incorporating ontologies into the current Web, with an aim to make computers understand rather than simply display. Ontology, an explicit specification of a conceptualization, and the Semantic Web grounded on the ontology, have the potential for effective sharing and appropriate retrieval of geographical information. This paper describes a Semantic Web Service over the mobile Web that can offer pertinent tourism information according to user contexts. To do this, a tourism ontology was formalized in the PARA (Place-Attraction-Resource-Activity) ontology model by organizing tourist places, tourist attractions, tourism resources, and activities. Locational relationships between tourist places were also included in the PARA ontology model to take into account the movements of tourists on a railway network. The XML (Extensible Markup Language) Web Service in the middle tier manages the client-side request for information retrieval and the corresponding serverside response from the data provider. The PARA ontology was integrated into the XML Web Service for the conceptbased discovery of tourism information. The applicability of the proposed system was tested through a simulation experiment for Tokyo tourism.