Ontology Based Decision Making-Development of Tourism Ontology in Tamilnadu

Travel and tourism is commonly known as an information intensive domain where online information places a crucial role for the whole lifecycle of the journey. Tourism in India is the largest service industry with contribution of 6.23% to the national GDP and 8.78% of the total employment in India. According to the world travel and tourism council India will be a tourism hotspot by 2018 having the highest ten year growth potential. The travel and tourism competiveness report 2007 ranked tourism in India sixth in term of price competiveness and 39th in terms of security. Tamilnadu is the top state in attracting the maximum number of foreign tourist in India. The growth in the use of internet has transferred the web users to use the internet to gather travel related information. And recent development, the semantic web aims to extend the current web standards and technology so that the semantics of the web content is machine processable. Semantically annotated websites can not only be understood by the human readers but also by machines. The backbone of semantic web is formed by ontologies. Ontologies can assist organizational, browsing, parametric search, and in more general more intelligent access to an online information and service. This paper discusses on creating ontology with the tourism domain of enough knowledge so that the tourist can search for the right destination with their criteria.