STRATEGIC AND POLICY PROSPECTS FOR SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES ADOPTION IN US ONLINE TRAVEL INDUSTRY
Mohamed Youssef Kabbaj · 2003
Semantic Web Services (SWS), the emerging convergence of Web Services with Semantic Web, is the next major generation of the Web (and of the Internet), in which e-services and business communication become more knowledge-based and agent-based. This thesis discusses how SWS technologies have a particularly high chance to revolutionize one particular industry -travel, i.e., its on-line aspect -within the shortto medium-term time horizon (2-10 years). We focus on the U.S. on-line travel industry in particular, for which more up-to-date industry data and analysis sources are available. Our first new contribution is an analysis that identifies a likely area of early industry-wide strategic impact for SWS technologies: what in the travel industry lingo is called “Dynamic Packaging” (DP). DP means dynamically (i.e., in real-time) putting together -and pricing -a package of several major travel components, e.g., air flight legs, hotel nights, car rental days, etc., from heterogeneous suppliers and heterogeneous information sources or back-end reservation services, even as those provide frequently changing availability or prices. We discuss the current U.S. retail travel industry, focusing on its strategic aspects; these have policy implications including issues of privacy, other regulation, and potentially anti-trust. SWS, especially using automated rules cf. the RuleML emerging standard, offers the opportunity for significantly greater automation of exception handling, through exchange of rules that represent pricing, business policies, or regulations. Our second new contribution is to analyze the strategic drivers (i.e., promoters) and inhibitors of SWS adoption in DP in the travel industry, that are particular to that industry. We conclude that “the stars are aligned right” for SWS to actually have a major impact on the travel industry, largely through Dynamic Packaging, within the nearto medium-term time horizon (2-10 years), although technology investment is retarded by post-9/11 revenue volatility. Thesis advisor: Benjamin N. Grosof Title: Assistant Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan School of Management