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This paper reports on experiences of implementing a knowledge management system for the front desk domain in hotels, tourist offices and travel agencies. The strategic importance of explicit service knowledge is underlined, particularly for small and medium sized tourism enterprises. The main hypothesis that the paper tries to affirm is that tourism knowledge can be conceived of as symbolic action. The paper outlines the economic, social, industry and technological issues of building knowledge management systems for the front desk domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of tourism electronic data interchange is of vital interest to most tourism enterprises. Especially small and medium sized enterprises are forced to interchange data with other competitors. The approach presented in this paper enables electronic data interchange based on the technologies XML, XSLT, XML Names and XPath. These technologies are recommended by W3C, well supported and free of charge. The general architecture presented is based on the idea, to enable an easy configurable EDI by transforming the data of an XML file of one tourism application into another XML file usable for another tourism application. An example clarifies the usage of the introduced concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the tremendous growth of the Web, a broad spectrum of tourism information is already distributed over various Web sites. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection it is inevitable to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. The integration of distributed data sources has great impact on the quality of tourism information systems and follows the trend not to implement further systems, but to extend and improve existing systems. Towards a comprehensive integration of tourism data it is important to establish flexible data interchange facilities at tourism information systems, thus allowing interchange of structured data with other tourism information systems. To do this, the approach presented in this paper separates knowledge about data structures and data formats from the file generation process. This knowledge is transformed into a metal data structure represented by XML document type definitions (DTDs). If changes of the data interchange specification are necessary, it is sufficient to update the corresponding meta data information within the XML DTDs. The implementation of the data interchange processor remains unchanged and therefore the administration effort is significantly reduced, [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of tourism electronic data interchange is of vital interest to almost every tourism enterprise. Small- and medium-sized tourism enterprises are virtually forced to interchange data with other competitors. The approach presented in this paper enables electronic data interchange based on the technologies XML and XSLT. These technologies are recommended by W3C, well supported and free of charge. The presented architecture enable easy configurable, flexible and cost-efficient EDI by transforming data stored within XML documents into a requested data format corresponding to a destination TIS. The transformation specification is defined within XSL style sheets; thus, necessary changes and adaptations do not affect the applications of participating TIS providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]