76 Int. J. Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. An ontology-based system for intelligent matching of travellers’ needs for Group Package Tours Dimitris N. Kanellopoulos Department of Tourism Management, Technological Educational Institute of Patras, Greece, Meg. Alexandrou 1, GR 26334, Patras, Greece E-mail: d_kan2006@yahoo.gr Abstract: In recent years, the package tour industry has fostered a dependency on technology for its operational and strategic management. However, the existing tools for facilitating searches of availability of package tours do not provide intelligent matching between offered package tours and the personal requirements of the travellers. The objective of this research work was to design an intelligent web portal to serve as service provider in tasks related with package tours. This portal aims at helping people living in Europe to find package tours that match their personal travel preferences. For this purpose, the knowledge of the package tour domain has been represented by means of ontology. Additionally, the ontological component allows for defining an ontology-guided search engine, which provides more intelligent matches between package tours offers and travelling preferences. Keywords: ontologies; Group Package Tours; GPT; travel agencies; web portal; semantic web. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Kanellopoulos, D.N. (2008) ‘An ontology-based system for intelligent matching of travellers’ needs for Group Package Tours’, Int. J. Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.76–99. Biographical notes: Dimitris N. Kanellopoulos holds a PhD Degree in Multimedia Communications from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Patras, Greece. Currently, he is with the Department of Tourism Management at the Technological Educational Institute of Patras. He is also a member of the Educational Software Development Laboratory (ESDLab) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Patras. His research interests include: multimedia communications, intelligent information systems, knowledge representation, web engineering and web-based education. He has authored many papers in international journals and conferences at these areas. He serves as a member of the editorial boards in several academic journals. 1 Introduction Nowadays, semantic models are very significant in web applications, while many semantic web related applications and languages are being created. The semantic web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).