TripBlox: creating travel standards on the web

TripBlox is a web concept being developed at Travel Studios. Web 2.0 brought a plethora of niche sites that allowed users to publish structured data within walled gardens. TripBlox takes that one step further, allowing users to publish trip ideas, wish lists, and best of itineraries on their own blog. This is made possible using open standards such as XHTML and hAtom along with a tinge of travel related semantic sauce. Trip ideas can be published on MS live, a blog, or website (ex. a travel agent’s site). TripBlox becomes aware of formatted data when it receives “pings” in a manner similar to how technorati receives blog updates. Over time it becomes a search engine to help people find trip ideas.

For publishers TripBlox is a tool to broaden reach. A travel agent creates an example “dream” itinerary to demonstrate what they have to offer. They can keep the content on their own website and license it via creative commons or some other licensing scheme. TripBlox aids findability by indexing the travel agent’s trip and joining it with individual items (trip blocks). Travel bloggers and travel enthusiasts are also potential users of the TripBlox publishing standard.

For travel planners TripBlox provides a great place to begin dreaming by quickly connecting them with trips other people have taken or are planning to take. Connections can be made via a location, and activity, or a theme. TripBlox stores all content within RDF. Each trip links to the individual activities, points of interest, or hotels mentioned in the trip. This allows searchers to discover that an activity was mentioned in several other trips and navigate to those trips for details. This also plays into recommendations. TripBlox discovers which activities, hotels, or points of interest occur together.

During the talk I will discuss the trip publishing standard and the OWL ontology that it feeds. We will also investigate some of the reasoner techniques used to infer connections between trips, activities, hotels, and trip authors. I think this is a great topic because it’s a much needed example of microformats applied to a vertical (travel). XML is manifested within TripBlox in the following ways:

• xhtml content on niche sites and blogs
• hAtom and the xslt used to parse it into Atom
• ROME feed reader library (Java)
• OWL ontology