A key emerging opportunity for travel industry suppliers is to embrace richer cross-domain searching and decision technologies that provide consumers with new and better methods that complement their online travel search. At the 2010 Advisory Forum in Seattle, it was evident that the travel industry itself is reacting by focusing on a variety of emerging meta-data architectures for travel domain-specific search models and OpenTravel is embracing the opportunity to work with our members at the onset of this initiative.
One example of popular emerging meta-data architecture is the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is an Internet language for representing information about resources. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about web-available resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a web page, copyright and licensing information about a web document or the availability schedule for some shared resource.
Although in their infancy, meta-data architectures are emerging to address some of the core issues associated with domain-specific search methods, such as the release of RDFa, which uses a combination of metadata tags and ontologies or taxonomies to allow the specification of richer search criteria. These emerging technologies jointly benefit consumers and travel industry suppliers by allowing new concepts to be applied to a traditional internet search, for example with a search phrase such as “compact car rental special Phoenix”.
RDF is intended for situations in which information needs to be processed by applications, rather than people and, accordingly, provides a common framework for expressing this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. Since it is a common framework, application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools. The ability to exchange information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those fo which it was originally created.