An Expert Advisory System for Tourism in Kolkata

Abstract

Knowledge-based systems and, particularly, expert systems are bringing new thinking to how we view knowledge. Increasingly, we see knowledge as a commodity or an object, something generated, discovered, restructured, repackaged and delivered. Powerful tools have been developed for expediting our work in manipulating knowledge. People need to travel for business and people nowadays consider holidays to be more of a necessity than a luxury, so the tourism industry proves time after time to be a very resilient one. This paper therefore presents the development of an expert advisory system for tourism in Kolkata, where, in spite of its size and immense potential as a tourist destination, there has seen relatively low levels of international tourist arrivals and receipts. The expert tour advisory system can act as a guide for the tourists providing them with detailed and up-to-date information, ask them for their purpose of visit, take their preferences as input and generate the detailed tour schedules according to their need using its expert knowledge based inference engine. These are the areas where the tourists are mostly cheated and their purpose of visit is not served. The developed tour advisory system has two major components, i.e. a) knowledge base to capture the relevant tour information, and b) an inference engine to design the tour schedule based on the user preferences. Broadly, three main purposes of the expert tour advisory system are identified, i.e. a) provision of tour information, b) tour schedule generation, and c) knowledge base update, so three different applications are developed, which work on a single database. The tourists will use the first two applications, whereas the third application will be used by the concerned knowledge engineers. Particular emphasis is given on the formulation of the heuristics in knowledge engineering and the design of a user-friendly interface. Problems associated with the implementation experience and future directions are also discussed.

Key Words: Tour advisory system, Expert system, Database, Graphical user interface, Kolkata, Tourist spot

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