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The Crazy Hotelier
10
HOTEL
RECEPTION
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
11. www.sti-innsbruck.at
The Crazy Hotelier
11
HOTEL
RECEPTION
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
12. www.sti-innsbruck.at
The Crazy Hotelier
12
HOTEL
RECEPTION
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
- fora & destination sites
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
13. www.sti-innsbruck.at
The Crazy Hotelier
13
HOTEL
RECEPTION
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
- fora & destination sites
- chat
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
14. www.sti-innsbruck.at
The Crazy Hotelier
14
HOTEL
RECEPTION
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
- fora & destination sites
- chat
- video & photo sharing
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
20. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Dissemination
Dissemination refers to the process of broadcasting a
message to the public. Classification of channels:
– Static Broadcasting
– Dynamic Broadcasting
– Sharing
– Collaboration
– Social Networks
– Internet Forum and Discussion Boards
– On-line Group Communication
–Semantic-based Communication
Image taken from: http://www.softicons.com/free-icons/application-icons/or-applications-icons-by-iconleak/file-cabinet-icon
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Static Broadcasting
• Prehistoric methods of dissemination: cave drawings, stories of triumphs on
columns and arches, history on pyramids, stones with messages
• More modern means: printed press, newspapers, journals
• Online static dissemination: homepage …. And various web sites
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Dynamic Communication
Small piece of content that is dependent
on constraints such as time or location.
Examples of tools (organized considering first
the length of message and second – the level of
interactivity)
• News Feeds (f.e., RSS)
• Newsletters
• Email / Email lists
• Microblogs (twitter, tumblr, …)
• Blogs
• Social networks
• Chat and instant messaging applications
(skype, messenger, …)
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Sharing
• There are a large number of Web 2.0 websites that support the sharing of information
items such as: bookmarks, images, slides, and videos, etc.
• Can use specialized applications (see below) of features of other platforms and
services (e.g. share photos through Facebook)
• Examples:
– Flickr, Pinterest – means of exchanging photos, visible to all users (no account necessary),
allows users to post comments;
– Slideshare – channel for storing and exchanging presentations;
– YouTube and VideoLectures – sharing videos, all users can see the posted videos and leave
comments on the websites
– Social Bookmark sites: e.g. delicious, digg, StumbleUpon
– Social News websites: e.g. reddit
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Dissemination through Collaboration
Wiki
• “Wiki” = Hawaiian word for “fast” of “quick”.
• Described by the developer of the first wiki software, Ward Cunningham, as the
“simplest online database that could possibly work”*.
• Websites whose users can add, modify or delete content via a web browser using
simplified markup language or a rich-text editor.
• Most of the content is created collaboratively.
• Promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making link
creation intuitively easy and showing whether an intended page exists or not.
• Often used for internal collaboration, however, when public also
an indirect means for dissemination.
*http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
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Social Networks
• Provide a community aspect, i.e. forms a community that shares information in a
multi-directional way
• Common features (regardless of platform):
– construct a public/semi-public profile;
– articulate list of other users that they share a connection with;
– view the list of connections within the system
• Some sites allow users to upload pictures, add multimedia content or modify the look
and feel of the profile
• Social networks typically offer more than one channel of dissemination (thus they will
be considered platforms with many available dissemination channels):
– Facebook: Pages, Groups, Share options
– LinkedIn and Xing are focused on professional use and fit the purpose of organizations
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Internet Forums and Discussion Boards
• Web applications managing user-generated content
• Early forums can be described as a web version of an email list or newsgroup
• Internet forums are prevalent in several countries: Japan, China
• Are governed by a set of rules
• Users have a specific designated role, e.g. moderator, administrator
• Common features
– Tripcodes and capcodes - a secret password is added to the user's name following a
separator character
– Private message
– Attachment
– BBCode and HTML
– Emoticon or smiley to convey emotion
– RSS and ATOM feeds
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Group Communication
• Many-to-many
• Threaded conversations
• Usually created on a particular topic
• Have different access levels
• Better for disseminating within a group that shares common interests as the purpose
of the services is to enable collaboration, information sharing and discussions
• Exampled: Google Groups, Facebook Groups, Yahoo! Groups, LinkedIn Groups,
Xing Groups.
• Similar in many ways to Discussion boards and Internet Forums
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Semantic Based Dissemination
Rich Snippets
• Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed
to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query.
• If Google understands the content on your pages, it can create rich snippets—
detailed information intended to help users with specific queries.
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The three dimensions
31
Format
e.g. RDFa
Implementation
e.g. OWLIM
Vocabulary
e.g. foaf
HTML
Meta
Element
s
1999
RDFs
1998
RDF
2004
RDFa
2005
Microformats
2007
OWL
2008
SPARQL
2009
OWL 2
2010
RIF
2011
Microdata
... and a lot more
34. www.sti-innsbruck.at
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Definition*
Social Media Monitoring is the continuous systematic observation and
analysis of social media networks and social communities. It supports a
quick overview and insight into topics and opinions on the social web.
*http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Media#Monitoring
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Social Media Monitoring
• Social Media Monitoring tools facilitate the listening of what people say
about various topics in the social media sphere (blogs, twitter, Facebook,
etc.)
Listening: is active, focused, concentrated attention for the purpose of
understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker.
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Social Media Monitoring
Channels to analyze
The
Conversation
SOCIAL NETWORKS
WIKIS
PHOTO SHARING
BLOGS MAINSTREAM MEDIA
MICROBLOGS
FORUMS/NEWSGROUPS
VIDEO SHARING
SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS
AGGREGATORS
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Channels to analyze
Social networks, e.g.:
• Facebook (Q1 2012):
– 526 million daily active users
– 3.2 billion Likes and Comments per
day
– 500K comments per minute
– 700K status updates per minute
– 80K wall posts per minute
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• Twitter:
– 200 million Tweets per day (2011)
– 200K Tweets per minute
• LinkedIn: 147 million users
• Google+: 170 million users
38. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Channels to analyze
Sharing networks, e.g.:
• YouTube:
– 4 billion videos are viewed a day
– 100 million people take a social action on YouTube every week (likes, shares,
comments, etc)
• Flickr: >6.500 new photos per minute
• Pinterest:
– 13 million users
– American users spend an average of 97.8 minutes
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Channels to analyze
News feeds
• Total Feeds*: 694,311
• Atom Feeds*: 86,496
• RSS feeds*: 438,102 (63% of
the total)
*source: http://www.syndic8.com
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Blogs:
• >95 million blogs available online
• 22K posts per minute
• Tumblr (Q2 2012):
– 55.9 Million blogs
– 23.3 Billion posts
– 20K posts per minute
• WordPress (Q2 2012)
– 73.724.911 WordPress sites
40. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Channels to analyze
Traditional mediums:
• TV:
– 365 TV channels licensed in Germany
• Radio:
– 822 Radio stations in Germany
• Print mediums (newspapers, magazines)
– 382 Daily newspapers in Germany
– 4180 Weekly magazines in Germany
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Reference architecture
• SCEI is a reference architecture.
• A reference software architecture is a software architecture where the
structures and respective elements and relations provide templates for
concrete architectures in a particular domain.
• A reference architecture consists of a list of functions and some
indication of their interfaces (or APIs) and interactions with each other
and with functions located outside of the scope of the reference
architecture.
• SCEI provides a semantic engagement engine applicable to various
domains and tasks.
• Core of its efficiently and flexibility is its separation of concern.
• And the proper separation and alignment of form and substance.
• In total, SCEI is based on three different types of functionalities.
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SCEI *sky
• Infrastructure
– The infrastructure layer provides basic functionalities needed by the other
functionalities.
– The infrastructure layer is responsible for separating and multiple alignments of
communication content and communication channels.
• Communication
– The communication layer used the basic functionality of the infrastructure layer to
implement the on-line communication of an agent.
– It combines these elements into useful patterns of on-line interactions.
– It supports exchange of meaning.
• Engagement
– turns communication into cooperation.
– Workflow
– Crow sourcing
– Value generation through on-line cooperation.
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Customization of the Architecture
• To derive concrete products and services from the reference
architecture it must be instantiated for Application types (Tasks) and
Domains.
• Task customization:
– Advertisement
– Customer Relationship Management
– Revenue management
– Brand management
– Reputation management
– Quality management
• Domain Customization: E.g., eTourisms.
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Infrastructure
• Content can be down-/and uploaded from GUIs,
Repositories, CMSs, and others
• Channels are the millions of on-line communication
possibilities
Infrastructure
Content
Channels
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Semantic Analysis
• Discovering facts in texts and other sources (audio, video, etc.)
• Deriving additional facts from them
• Typical tasks:
– Topic detection
– Named entity recognition
– Co-reference and Disambiguation
– Relation Extraction
– Sentiment detection and Opinion mining
– Social annotation
– Text summarization
• Obviously all of them are needed in Social Media Analysis
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Semantic as a channel
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• Not to be interpreted by humans, but machines that can make something
out of it:
• Publishing Linked Data can take various formats and vocabularies
51. www.sti-innsbruck.at
The three dimensions
51
Format
e.g. RDFa
Implementation
e.g. OWLIM
Vocabulary
e.g. foaf
HTML
Meta
Element
s
1999
RDFs
1998
RDF
2004
RDFa
2005
Microformats
2007
OWL
2008
SPARQL
2009
OWL 2
2010
RIF
2011
Microdata
... and a lot more
59. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Infrastructure – Weaver
• Separating content from channels also requires the explicit alignment of
both.
• This is achieved through a weaver.
• A weaver is
– an uni-set of tuples describing bi-directional content-channel mappings,
– an execution engine for these tuples,
– a GUI to define these tuples, and
– a management and monitoring component for these tuple sets.
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Use a weaver to align content and channels
Weaver
Branch specific Ontology
Collect feedback
+
statistics
Web 3.0/Mobile/OtherWeb/Blog
Distribute content
Social Web
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Semantic Channel Modelling
• The number of digital publishing channels has increased exponentially in
the past decade.
• Using semantics (i.e., an Ontology) to describe these channels.
• Automatic review and adjustment of content and dissemination to channels
based on semantic match-making.
• Content-Channel mapping becomes an instance of Ontology alignment.
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Communication & Engagement
• Meaningful communication requires often more than just a single and
isolated act of exchanging information.
– It can be active or reactive (Dissemination, Social Media Monitoring, and its
integration)
– It has a trace, a history
– It needs multi-channel switch
– It is bi-directional and multi-agent
– It is based on patterns of successful interaction styles (campaigning versus individual
interaction, etc.)
• For effective engagement (cooperation) is needed:
– Workflow management
– Crowd sourcing
– Value chain generation
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Multi-channel booking problem
• Hotels are facing the multi-channel booking problem
• More than 100 different booking channels available
• Daily maintenance of right balance of rooms availability
across more than 100 channels does not scale
• Average time for hoteliers required to maintain a profile of a
medium size hotel at one portal takes between 5 to 15
minutes a day
• An effort of maintaining hotel’s profile on 100 portals would
require then at least 20 hours of work
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Direct bookability for hotels
• Booking quickly and directly via hotel Web sites
• Seekda producs for direct bookability:
– Dynamic Shop
– Dynamic Shop Mobile
• Benfits:
– Hotels do not give part of their profit to booking chanells
– Guests spend less time in booking using the instant booking engine solution of
seekda
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Direct bookability for hotels - challenges
• Does the customer find the hotel web site?
• Does the customer trust the web site?
• Are his/her requests properly answered?
• Is his/her feedback taken serious and form a positive review of the hotel?
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Multi Channel Communication and Yield
Management
• Multi-channel communication tools can improve revenues and benefits
within the hospitality industry by:
– Increasing the on-line visible presence of hotels
– Make hotels offers visible to a broader audience via multiple channels
– Attract potential guests to hotel websites and thus increase direct bookability
– effective and targeted on-line marketing
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Touristic Portal
• Multi-channel communication (SCEI *sky)
• seekda booking engine
• Linked Open Data (LOD)
• On the fly service integration as you pay
• Everything integrated into a comprehensive map
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Linked Open Data (LOD)
• Use LOD to integrate and lookup data
about
– places and routes
– time-tables for public transport
– hiking trails
– ski slopes
– points-of-interest
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On the fly service intergation as you pay
• Data and services from destination
sites integrated for recommendation
and booking of
– Hotels
– Restaurants
– Cultural and entertainment events
– Sightseeing
– Shops
• Two integration approaches:
– ad-hoc service integration: via Web
scrapping as a quick integration
solution
– via APIs and backend integration
for a long term, durable solution
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Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
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• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
• Hotels, ski passes,
etc. directly bookable
– seekda engine
SCEI
77. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
77
• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
• Hotels, ski passes,
etc. directly bookable
– seekda engine
• LOD to integrate and
lookup data about
hiking trails, ski
slopes, etc.
LODSCEI
78. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
78
• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
• Hotels, ski passes,
etc. directly bookable
– seekda engine
• LOD to integrate and
lookup data about
hiking trails, ski
slopes, etc.
• On the fly service
integration as you pay
LODSCEI
80. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Summary
• The multi-channel monster can be seen as a threat of:
– Failing to be properly present (active and passive) in a multitude of opportunities
– Spending a non-justify effort on achieving the former
– Going out of business in both cases (even if for different reasons)
• We propose a scalable solution for this based on using semantics.
• Core is the separation of content and channel and its explicit
interweavement.
• For our approach, semantics is a corner stone but requires many
additional services and layers to actually provide its potential.
• Together with Seekda we are currently focusing on the eTourisms
domain, however, other verticals may follow.
• In general, we target domains (verticals) with many SMEs that need to
intensively interact with their customers on-line.
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