Responsible Rural Tourism

Title

Responsible Rural Tourism Ontology

Research Problem

Tourism plays an important role in transforming Malaysia into a high-economy country besides making our country popular. Therefore, the activities of tourism industry are directed towards improving the Malaysian tourism sites. Somehow, many tourism sites tend to be non-sustainable in terms of environmental protection and sound waste management. For example, much of the corals on Pulau Payar were damaged due to mass arrival of tourists as the travel operators has allowed 600 to 700 tourists on the island at one time (Evelyn Kaur, 2015). On one hand, there is a push to bring in tourist dollars but on the other little is done to protect the precious biodiversity which is its main attraction.

As mentioned by WTO (2001), sustainable tourism is the “development that meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity and life support system”. Sustainable tourism embraces all segments of tourism industry with guidelines and criteria that seek to reduce environmental impacts particularly the use of non-renewable resources using measurable benchmarks and to improve tourism’s contribution to sustainable development and environmental conservation. There is need to study sustainable tourism features particularly rural sites, which is focus for Malaysia. There are already existing different publically available tourism ontologies that may serve as basis for problem specific tourism ontologies. However, these tourism ontologies mainly focus on travel needs of tourist and there are no ontologies that have focused on sustainability. Rural tourism is also an area that is scarcely researched, leaving many gaps for ontologies in this area. Besides that, current ontology rarely takes into consideration multi-perspective

It is a semantic markup language for ontology representation. It is resulting from the merging of DAML + OIL languages to extend the RDF syntax. OWL is identical to RDF(s) with a much greater degree of interference. It provides three increasingly expressive sublanguages: OWL Full, OWL DL (Description Logic) and OWL Lite. OWL build on RDF and RDF (s) adds more vocabulary to describe the properties and relationship among the classes with higher typing of properties and characteristic properties in building ontology (Horridge, Knublauch, Rector, Stevans, & Wroe, 2004).

• Tools

Ontology development tools facilitate the process of development and the reuse of ontologies. The most relevant tools to facilitate the development of ontologies are listed in Table 1 with a summary description, the name of tool, purposes, pricing policy and software architecture and backup management.

Table 1 List of Ontology Tools

Ontology Tool Purpose Pricing Policy and Software Architecture Backup Management Ontolingua To ease the development of Ontolingua ontologies in a shared environment between distributed groups Free Web access

Client/Server No

WebOnto To support the collaborative browsing, creation and editing ontologies Free Web access

3-tier