Towards Effective Tourism Dynamic Packages

Abstract

This paper describes the Open Tourism Initiative (OTI) as a framework to support tourism activities, following the Tourism Virtual Enterprise (TVE) organizational model and pragmatics based collaboration decisions. To assure the better alignment among tourism services providers and client’s expectations, the framework (and its architecture) must support reliable interoperability and dynamic networking reconfiguration as well as the (co-)creation of the tourist’s activity regardless of information systems and using real-time collaboration mechanisms. When a member of the TVE scheduled to provide a given service is somehow conditioned, unable to participate, has to be disentailed from the network, or due to events not necessarily measurable or deterministic, the it is necessary to reconfigure the VE in almost real time. The need to reconfigure could result from changes in controlled (measured) parameters as well as from uncontrolled (contextual and pragmatic) ones. OTI enhances dynamic tourism packages management under the requirements of reconfigurable environments and human direct participation. This article proposes a logical model for TVE organizations as well as an UML formalization for its supporting architecture.