Introduction

The ALADDIN Project is of considerable relevance, as European SMEs (small- to medium-sized enterprises) in the tourism and travel industry are facing serious challenges from large international companies. Incoming tour operators, tourist offices, restaurants, hotels, museums and comparable establishments are typically small- to medium-sized enterprises which need to deliver different services for the same customer – the tourist – in a cost-efficient, but attractive way.

The goal of ALADDIN is to build a Multilingual Mobile Destination Management for SMEs. It is a cooperative effort among five SMEs, of which three are technology partners and two are users. Several research institutions will also furnish technology and tourism market knowledge, including valuable input in terms of system requirements and evaluation. The users will offer a test bed for the completed prototype.

ALADDIN is expected to lead to a sustainable enhancement of the competitiveness of European SMEs in the tourism area (1) through enhancing transnational cooperation in the tourism area, (2) through enabling tourist relationship management through providing mobile CRM (customer relationship management) features, and (3) through including localized content through the use of LTC’s translation service.

The Challenges

Optimal mobile destination management is composed of four main components:

• The mobile workspace for incoming agencies and tour operators
• The mobile leisure environment for the tourist
• The seamless integration of both workspace and leisure environment through personal characterization data to benefit the tourist
• A multilingual access facility in (near) real-time

All components present distinct technical challenges. The goal is to define and resolve these challenges through a partnership between universities, technology providers and users.

Optimizing tour-transfer-setups, providing tailored offerings and handling last-minute changes to hotel bookings are the key issues for an incoming tour operator. The upcoming trends in the near future for this sector of the industry include (1) mixed individual/group traveling and (2) highly volatile business processes (last-minute bookings and changes to hotel and flight reservations). These mean an increase in process complexity, and therefore, in costs. Without an optimized mobile workspace, which supports their business processes, small companies cannot compete with larger incoming tour operators.

With the rapid growth of mobile terminals (smart phones, pocket PCs, etc.), there will be a substantial mobile marketplace for leisure services in the destination area. Due to the high number of distinct device types – even today, there are hundreds – SMEs cannot afford to participate in this new mobile marketplace. On top of this, an aging society, with its growing demand for safety on the one hand, coupled with a young generation, with its well-established mobile behavior on the other, will require many diverse usage scenarios.

ALADDIN is designed to provide a cost-efficient and powerful destination management toolbox. The tools will allow SMEs (restaurants, art galleries, etc.) to offer their services and content in an attractive and easily accessible manner to their customers. The incoming tour operator management will provide the required personal context for different tourist profiles, so that SMEs can effectively target very specific and well-defined services for each customer segment.

Multilingual Requirements

The multilingual requirements in this industry are quite obvious. First of all, tourists and incoming tour operators can be nationals of any country, interacting with nationals of any other country. Therefore, the user interface of the planned mobile workspace must be localized into a number of relevant languages. Secondly, content relevant to tourists must be made available in their preferred languages, either on-the-fly or with only a minor delay.

ALADDIN has identified the area of tourist service implementation as a key application area for SME tour operators in order to meet the above challenges. In this setting, local tour guides – as the mobile workforce of incoming tour operators – are considered to be the most important players.

• They are in direct contact with the customer, representing the tour operator and providing the chance to immediately interact with the customer.
• They act as mediators between the tourists and the local region (e.g., helping to overcome language barriers).
• They can be trained to efficiently use new IT systems, as opposed to tourism solutions that are targeted for the individual traveller.
• They know the regional service providers and can react immediately to optimize the utilization of hotel and transfer capacities.

With the support of a sophisticated mobile application running on an appropriate device, a tour guide can offer various downstream and upstream tourist services. Furthermore, s/he can interact electronically with the back office and other suppliers (including location-based services) in a very sophisticated, effective and flexible way.

Currently, companies in the tourist industry with 0-49 employees only use up to 22% of the remote access capability of their company networks. The figure for companies employing 50-249 employees is only 38%. The percentage of mobile access is considerably lower.

ALADDIN will enable SMEs to effectively access and leverage all of this idle capacity by providing a mobile application designed to meet the requirements of an optimized SME process through standardized and easy-to-implement interfaces with sophisticated support for tour guides.

To help overcome existing language barriers in the relevant scenarios, LTC will contribute its LTC Communicator. The latter is a multilingual e-communication software system used in various application environments that will be interfaced with the ALADDIN system.

At the technical level, LTC Communicator is comprised of the following components:

1. A translation memory (TM) populated with relevant bilingual material
2. An interface to a machine translation (MT) program (e.g., SYSTRAN), including a custom dictionary with key terms relevant to the tourist industry
3. A workflow server responsible for workflow management with the following components:
   • an automation server that interfaces external translation services with the ‘translation bus’ (a transmission channel through which data is carried from one automation server to another),
   • a web server that receives the translation request wrapped in XML,
   • an optional post-editing service that routes machine-translated text to human revisers, if high quality and publishable output is required, as opposed to understandable (or gisted) output.

Together, these function as a ‘black box,’ with input and output in XML format. Therefore, the only real changes that are required for an existing application to integrate with LTC Communicator are as follows:

• To generate (and read) XML messages in the specified format
• To tag the messages with meta information (such as source and target languages, quality required, speed required, etc.) and to route them correctly through the automated translation environment

The LTC Communicator architecture is shown schematically below:

In principle, the system can handle any language combination, limited only by the capabilities of the MT software available. Between them, the existing MT systems support all major European languages, along with an increasing number of non-European languages.

Once the system is set up, it is relatively easy to add other languages, with the workflow server ensuring that each incoming message is directed to the appropriate MT module within the translation environment. A single help desk can then support users in many different countries at little additional cost.

Adaptation for Multilingual Content Provision Within the ALADDIN Project

LTC will adapt the LTC Communicator to enable the ALADDIN environment to provide relevant, multilingual information to tourist guides and/or directly to tourists. Users will be able to request hotel information, culturally relevant content, etc. via a localized ALADDIN user interface in their own language. In order to provide this capability, LTC will evaluate (in collaboration with the other technology partners) the structure of the ALADDIN system, and the semantic tagging applied, with the goal of proposing an appropriate solution for implementing multilingual keyword search.

Appropriate workflows must also be designed and implemented for the following possible scenarios in order to ensure translation workflow and output quality:

SCENARIO 1: The user requires translated information immediately.

• where they can find the nearest pharmacy or emergency medical facility, which ones are open AND how to get there
• where they can find the nearest local specialty restaurant, AND how they can make a reservation immediately
• where they can find the place of departure for a romantic evening cruise, AND how they can purchase tickets via their cell phones

Information requirements of this kind will be handled via the LBS (location-based service) as part of the ALADDIN toolbox. A multi-channel approach will be used to exchange multilingual information between the ALADDIN system and the tourist. All information (public and private content) and services delivered to the tourist will be relevant to his/her specific location and tailored to that person’s profile.

SCENARIO 2: The user requires high-quality translated information on specific topics.

Under this scenario, tourists will require accurate, current and relevant information about a multitude of topics – not only basic facts regarding sites, accommodations, restaurants, performances, schedules, routes, guide support, etc., but detailed information as well about cultural, historical and any other content of interest about the destination area.

To meet this need, huge libraries of machine-readable content must be made available for a large number of European destinations. It is unrealistic to assume that all such content will be stored in multilingual databases, translated in advance, and thus available to tourists and tour guides via their mobile devices immediately. Instead, it is more likely that ALADDIN will offer a translation-on-demand model for higher volume and more detailed content, which will require a more sophisticated approach in terms of multilingual availability.

When a user orders content that requires translation, it will be machine-translated, routed to human post-editing services and returned as high-quality, translated content. The revised language strings will be saved in LTC Communicator’s TM. The next time the same document is requested in the same target language, the translated version will be immediately available, either directly from ALADDIN’s multilingual knowledge database, or via the automated translation process whereby the high-quality translated strings are available through TM. In either case, it will be unnecessary to process the content through the MT system a second time.

The disadvantage of the high quality approach lies in the fact that there will be a cost for the post-editing, and (depending on the amount of detailed content required) a delay for post-editing material that has never been translated before. The advantage is obviously a high quality output, along with increasing speed and quality over time. With previously translated content available via the multilingual knowledge database or via TM, only the updated sections will require manual processing.

It is likely that the raw MT output, customized through terminology from the tourism domain, will be sufficient for small amounts of information that are required immediately. However, background information (such as content related to the history of a town or a monument, along with more detailed cultural information with learning content) will need to be presented as high quality output in the target language. This means that tour guides and/or tourists themselves will need to access the ALADDIN interface, obtain information about content already available in their language, and then request that any missing information be translated. There may be a short delay, after which they will be alerted that the requested information has been translated and is now available for download.

Innovation Potential

The innovation of the overall ALADDIN service is that it will provide an up-to-date, comprehensive and mobile multilingual electronic tourist information guide. The tourist will have available quickly the most relevant and current data in his/her native language.

Attractive features of the service include the following:

• It will enable users to gain immediate access to information and/or services, e.g. local attractions, shopping, places of interest, directions, etc. This will include providng the tourist with his/her location, using the most suitable channel (e.g., in the format of a map or a photograph). The service can then direct the person to the next destination and identify the best method of available transportation. It can also propose a list of worthwhile attractions or entertainment options which are nearby and relevant.
• It will incorporate intelligent decision processing. This capability will account for an individual's needs, based on established personal criteria, and then deliver information tailored for the recipient. The system can suggest service promotions and deals to the tourist, again, relevant to his/her location, available time and personal profile.
• The multilingual provision of public and private content will allow for improved interaction through heightened usability.
• Its strength lies in its completeness for addressing the tourist's information needs, thus dramatically improving the satisfaction that can be derived from his/her trip.
• ALADDIN will also make possible an economically sustainable model for SMEs in the tourism sector. The opportunities the system creates for effective information delivery, along with its convenience and ease-of-use, is designed to appeal to two groups: the tourists and the tourism industry, the system's primary customer.

To cope with the challenges of the mobile workspace, the application features, network access and interfaces to third party systems are bound to play major roles. Due to the mobile workspace of a tour guide, the system needs to be operated on a mobile, presumably wearable, device. Definition and investigation of an appropriate hardware environment will be part of ALADDIN, e.g. mobile printers, mobile card readers and mobile scanners.

Customer satisfaction among group travelers is, to a large extent, directly related to the performance of the tour guide. The latter is expected to compensate for bad weather, unexpected problems and typical crisis situations. At the same time, this satisfaction is based on the effectiveness of knowledge transfer from the guide to the tourist.

In academia, consumer behavior (especially single traveler) has been widely researched. On the contrary, the interaction between tour guides and travel groups has not been researched scientifically. Within ALADDIN, this new area will be investigated for the first time in a scientific context.

Therefore, considerable innovation can be expected from the ALADDIN project, including new services and the re-organization of existing processes supported by an integrated mobile application. Examples include:

• Systematic identification of the requirements for a mobile application for tour guides of travel groups, who currently are entirely paper-based (e.g., before the arrival of a moderate-sized tour group, it is typical for more than 1,000 pieces of paper to be printed)
• Development of new services provided by a mobile application used by a tour guide for tour group travelers
• Documentation of a reference architecture for a mobile tour guide application
• Implementation and evaluation of a mobile application for tour guides
• Identification and documentation of a basic compilation of target destinations, which are suitable for LBS services, serving as a reference for the identification of potential markets
• Evaluation of the acceptance of mobile applications for tour guides and identification of key success factors for the development of new services for travel group tourists
• Evaluation and implementation of a multilingual toolbox enabling multilingual communication in (near) real-time, depending on the service and the level of information required

In summary, the development of ALADDIN provides new opportunities for tour operators and tour guides, which will benefit the industry through improved processes and new services. The ALADDIN prototype opens up a completely new application area, which should be considered as an important growth market for the future. The SMEs that are participating in ALADDIN intend to develop a new standard product after the project is completed.

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Dr. Adriane Rinsche is Founder and Managing Director of The Language Technology Centre Ltd. She has been the appointed evaluator for several Calls for Proposals for the European Commission’s DG XIII and reviewer for several EU project evaluations. You can reach Rinsche at ARinsche@langtech.co.uk.