The travel and tourism sector is one of the biggest economic branches world-wide. For this sector the World Wide Web plays an increasingly important role, be it for the purpose of providing information or for actual commercial transactions. More and more users gather relevant information through the internet and take to planning and organising their journeys through the electronic media. Such users typically prefer and sometimes have no choice but to search and retrieve the information in their own language. Thus, the multilinguality of the information is of crucial importance. For the service and information provider this means that he has to cope with the problem of maintaining and offering complex information in different languages.
The MIETTA system allows the user to search the WWW for tourist information on specific regions (Rome, Saarland, Turku) in several different languages (English, Finnish, French, German and Italian). The system offers a combination of advanced free text with category-based search. The provider is given the facility to generate and present information from heterogeneous sources in different languages. Language independent relational database information can serve as the input for automatic multilingual text generation. Through the employment of machine translation, the user is offered the possibility to search in his own language for documents, which he can then download as translations or in the original. The system is complemented by sophisticated registration facilities for web documents and user profiling for individualised search.
- Flexible cross-lingual access to tourist information in the web
- Combination of class-based and free text search
- Simultaneous access to heterogeneous data sources (WWW and databases)
- Presentation of information in different languages through machine translation and multilingual generation
- Advanced localisation and web-technology for simplified maintenance
Partners
Commune di Roma (Coordinator), CELI S.p.A. Torino , City of Turku, Politecnico di Torino, Staatskanzlei des Saarlandes, Unidata S.p.A., University of Helsinki
