List of Participants

SATINE Project's Main Achievements:

The tourism industry today is the second largest economic sector, after manufacturing in the world. Earlier than in other sectors, tourism embarked on e-Business, not only with respect to B2B, but also to B2C. Currently, travel information services are dominantly provided by Global Distribution Systems (GDSs).  All the airlines, many hotel chains and car rental companies list their inventory with major GDSs.  A GDS gives its subscribers pricing and availability information for multiple travel products such as flights.  Travel agents, corporate travel departments, and even Internet travel services, subscribe to one or more GDSs. However, small and medium-sized enterprises, for example "bed and breakfast" type accommodation or companies hiring bicycles, restaurants and a host of others cannot participate to GDS-based e-Business activities since selling their products through GDSs is too expensive for them.

Furthermore, GDSs are legacy systems, and suffer from a number of problems, in that they mostly rely on private networks, they are mainly for human use, have difficult to use cryptic interfaces, have limited speed and search capabilities, and are difficult to inter-operate with other systems and data sources. What this means is that the tour operators, travel agencies, etc. cannot benefit fully from the advantages of electronic business-to-business trading. 

To facilitate eBusiness, the travel industry has formed a consortium called the Open Travel Alliance (OTA), and OTA is producing XML schemas of message specifications to be exchanged between the trading partners, including availability checking, booking, rental, reservation, query services, insurance, etc. However not every travel company's applications can be expected to produce and consume OTA compliant messages.

The SATINE Project has realized a secure semantic-based interoperability framework for exploiting Web service platforms in conjunction with Peer-to-Peer networks in tourism industry. The achievements of the SATINE project to date are as follows:

§         Web service technology is an ideal fit for travel information systems. However to be able to exploit Web services to their full potential, it is necessary to introduce semantics. Without describing the semantics of Web services to be discovered, it is difficult to find them in an automated way and if we can not describe the service we have, the probability that people will find it in an automated way is low.

In the SATINE project, we describe how to deploy semantically enriched travel Web services and how to exploit semantics through Web service registries. We also address the need to use the semantics in discovering both Web services and Web service registries through peer-to-peer technology. The mechanisms are described in detail in the following publications:

• Dogac, A., Y. Kabak, G. Laleci, S. Sinir, A. Yildiz, A. Tumer, " SATINE Project : Exploiting Web Services in the Travel Industry ", eChallenges 2004 (e-2004), 27 - 29 October 2004, Vienna, Austria.
• Dogac, A., Kabak, Y., Laleci, G. , Sinir, S., Yildiz, A., Kirbas, S., Gurcan, Y., "Semantically Enriched Web Services for the Travel Industry", ACM Sigmod Record, Vol. 33, No. 3, September 2004. (Science Citation Index Expanded, Impact Factor: 00.675)
• Web services, like their real life counterparts have several properties and thus truly useful semantic information can only be defined through standard ontology languages. Semantic Web is an important initiative in this respect. However, although service registries are the major mechanisms to discover services, the semantic support provided by service registries is completely detached from the Semantic Web effort.

In the SATINE project, the mechanisms to enrich ebXML registries through OWL-S ontologies for describing the Web service semantics are developed. Particularly, how the various constructs of OWL can be mapped to ebXML classification hierarchies and how the services are discovered through standardized queries by using the ebXML query facility are described.

Detailed information on these developed mechanisms is available in the following publications:

• Dogac, A., Kabak, Y., Laleci, G. , "Enriching ebXML Registries with OWL Ontologies for Efficient Service Discovery", 14th International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering, Boston, USA , March 28-29, 2004.
• Dogac, Y. Kabak, G. B. Laleci, C. Mattocks, F. Najmi, J. Pollock, "Enhancing ebXML Registries to Make them OWL Aware", accepted to the Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Science Citation Index Expanded, Impact Factor: 00.974). This work is also submitted to OASIS ebXML Registry Semantic Content Management Subcommittee as a proposal for a standard.
• Deliverable 4.1.1, UDDI and ebXML Service Registries enriched with Service Semantics
• Deliverable 4.2.1: Software Tools to associate the semantic information stored in the registry with the services advertised in the registry

§         The creation of complex services through the orchestration of simple Web services is an important task that is of particular relevance in the travel business: Apart from the typical examples like the composition of package tours more sophisticated services like a flight booking based on the availability of tickets for a certain cultural event are conceivable. Therefore in the context of the SATINE project a semantic Web service composition and execution framework is being developed. Details on Web service composition is provided in the following publication:

o       Matthias Flugge, Diana Tourtchaninova, "Ontology-derived Activity Components for Composing Travel Web Services", The International Workshop on Semantic Web Technologies in Electronic Business (SWEB2004), October 2004, Berlin.

• In SATINE Project, we develop a Semantic Wrapper for constructing and describing Web Services. The main role of this component is to wrap existing information resources to make them appear as semantically well-described Web Services. This component provides an easy to use tool for Small and Middle Enterprises to facilitate the creation and annotation of Web Services from their existing enterprise applications. The Semantic Wrapper provides two complementary tools: the Web Service Creator and the Web Service Annotator. The Web Service Creator transforms existing resources in Web Services. The Web Service Annotator describes a Web Service at a semantic level, using OWL-S as the ontology of reference. Details on this component are available in the following documents:
• Deliverable 5.1.1: Specifications of the Peer-to-Peer Semantics Wrapper
• Florin Dragan, Georges Gardarin, "Benchmarking an XML Mediator", accepted to 7th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Miami, May 2005.
• The Satine project’s first demonstrator towards “Prototype Phase I” is completed successfully and demonstrated in the following conferences and exhibitions:
• Satine Project first Review Meeting on October 26^th, 2004, Vienna
• eChallenges 2004 Conference on October 27-29, 2004, Vienna
• Satine Exhibition Stand was awarded the best exhibition stand at eChallenges e-2004 Conference.

Detailed information on the demonstration can be found in the following document:

• Storyboard of initial demonstrator
• The Satine Project’s second demonstrator Prototype Phase I is completed and demonstrated in the second Review Meeting on March 10^th, 2005, Brussels.

In Satine Prototype Phase I, mainly the integration of the following components under the responsibility of different partners is achieved:

• METU developed the semantically enriched ebXML component, the OWL mapping tool, Web service security mechanisms and the tools that allow the user to advertise and query Web services in the P2P Network.
• SATINE Portal and P2P architecture is developed by ED. The portal performs the authentication of the peers upon registration and monitors the available network population so that the newly joined peer can select which Super Peer and Trusted Peer it will connect. The portal is developed based on MERMIG platform.
• Web Service creation tool which wraps the existing databases that serve tourism information as Web services and Web Service Annotation tool which creates the semantic definitions of the Web services using the available ontologies in the system is developed by OXYMEL.
• The Web Service Composition tool, ontology deployment and UDDI registry enhancements developed by FOKUS are integrated to the current SATINE architecture.
• INTRO Solutions provided the travel Web services.

Detailed information on the Satine Prototype Phase I is available in the following document.

• Storyboard of First Prototype

Furthermore, the source codes of the Satine system are available in the SourceForge’s CVS repository. The Web address of the Satine project’s CVS repository is:

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/satineproject/
• Within the scope of the Satine Project, the end user partner Intro Solutions exposed some of the functionality of Amadeus and Galileo GDS as Web services. These Web services were integrated to the Satine Prototype Phase I and they can be discovered and invoked semantically by the Satine users. In addition to proving the feasibility of Satine framework, it becomes possible to show the benefits of exploiting Web services for interoperability in the travel domain. Work is going on to integrate the Satine system with the legacy application of Intro Solutions. This work reflects the middleware nature of the Satine framework. In addition to GDS Web services, Intro Solutions with the help of OXYMEL developed Web services to access the legacy application of a local hotel database. Developed Web services to date are as follows:
• Amadeus Web Services:
• MultiAvailabilityService: Given the destination and travel dates, this Web service provides the available flights.
• FlightInformationService: This Web service returns detailed information about a given flight including equipment, meal and duration information for each segment.
• AirReservationService: Enables booking of a specific air service itinerary; specific flight(s), seat type and passenger information.
• HotelSearchService: Given the destination and travel duration, the Web service lists summary information about the available hotels.
• HotelDescriptionService: It provides detailed information on a given hotel.
• HotelAvailabilityService: The Web service allows the users to query the availability in a given hotel in detail.
• HotelReservationService: This Web service reserves rooms in a specified hotel.
• VehicleAvailabilityService: Given the destination and travel duration, it provides the available vehicles as well as the associated car rental company.
• VehicleReservationService: The Web service reserves the specified vehicle.
• Galileo Web Services:
• MultiAvailabilityService: Given the destination and travel dates, this Web service lists the available flights.
• FlightInformationService: This Web service returns the details of a flight, given the flight number.
• AirReservationService: This Web service reserves seats in the specified flight.
• Local Hotel Web Services:
• SearchAndAvailablityService: The Web service returns the available rooms between the given dates.
• DetailedHotelInformationService: The Web service provides the hotel information in detail.
• ReservationService: The Web service allows the user to reserve rooms between the given dates.

Coordinator contact details:

Prof. Dr. Asuman Dogac
Department of Computer Engineering
Director of Software Research & Development Center
Middle East Technical University
06531, Ankara, Turkey
email: asuman[at]srdc[.]metu[dot]edu[dot]tr
home page: http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/~asuman
phone: +90 - 312 - 210 5598 or +90 - 312 - 210 2076
fax: +90 - 312 - 210 5572 or +90 - 312 - 210 1259