4. The Road to Semantics Customers tell us how they want to engage “Where can I rent a Camaro? “Can I rent a car with an MP3 jack?” “What do you have that fits a big man on a tight budget?” “Can I add a friend to the reservation?” “You’re sold out; now what?”
5. The Road to Semantics Car Rental Industry Challenges Purely transactional interactions Competitive differentiation Lack of granular marketing “tail on the dog”
6. The Road to Semantics Overcoming the Challenge Better Industry Partner Integration Better Product / Service Differentiation Better Merchandising & Distribution Finding rather than searching
7. The Road to Semantics Why Semantic Technology? Flexibility Power Association Marketing and Merchandising http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/3448804778/
8. The Road to Semantics Why a Car Rental Ontology? Top-line revenue marketing driven requirements Industry leadership and standardization OpenTravel Alliance responsible for SOA standards; ontology “a natural” Expansion to air, hotel, rail and other suppliers possible and desirable, driven by interoperability concerns Occurring in context of the growing importance of data strategy
9. The Road to Semantics What We Did Create an ontology for specific use cases Establish a ‘proprietary standard” Begin to execute the use cases But a proprietary-standard does not scale Help build an industry standard Travel is a deeply interrelated industry value chain Travel distribution is a highly automated and realtime system: arguably, the largest eCommerce category on the internet The Industry need standards for interoperability The Open Travel Alliance: XML web services standards Others: ATPCO, IATA, Open Axis…
10. The Road to Semantics Ontology project, driven by interest in better governance, better search optimization and leverage, better marketing, merchandising, CRM and analytics Improved intra-domain and cross-domain search functionality Use OTA to drive adoption of car rental ontology, and thereafter other travel ontologies
12. Ontology Components offering CarRental Agent Vehicles ISO 1087 AvisCarRental Facility CarRentalFacility The ontology intends to model the Avis line of business, and from the perspective of sales and marketing, but not from the perspective of operations. Thus, functions that are not of interest to the consumer, sales staff or marketing staff are not included in the model.
13. Preliminary Ontology Architecture Avis Vehicle Description Avis Vehicle Classification Avis Specific Terminology Avis Wizard Profile Avis Facilities Avis Contracts & Offers Avis Eligibility Requirements Vehicle Description ACRISS / OTA Vehicle Codes Common Domain Terminology General Renter Profile Rental Car Facilities Rental Contracts & Offers Rental Eligibility Agents/People Facilities Contracts & Offers Basic CRM Business Capability Concepts Language Countries Geospatial & Addressing Time & UoM Standard Utility Concepts Basic Terminology & Ontology Metadata Metadata
14. What is the Ontology Ultimately Good For? Responding to customers the way a person might Natural language with semantic interpretation Making differential offers Determining or suggesting customer rates, cars Inferring and responding to customer intent “are you in town for …?” “may we suggest …” Providing powerful business analytics Heterogeneous facts in unique, ad hoc combination
16. Attribute 1 Attribute 2 Leg Room Attribute 4 Attribute 5 Attribute 5 On-Off Access Attribute 7 Attribute 8 Attribute 9 Media Options Attribute 11 Attribute 12 Meal Options Attribute 14 Attribute 15 Time of Day Attribute 17 Attribute 18 Distance to Gate Attribute 20 Attribute 21 Flight Characteristics Attribute N … “Comfort-Oriented” Flight Semantic Merchandising
17. Search Enhancement Enrich search results, adding ratings, video, prices, avails, amenities, locality etc. Search engines as a “front door” dramatically increase relevance by inclusion of more meaningful, synonymic tags
Buddy:Purely transactional interactions‘The best you can say is: it was uneventful’Competitive differentiationIn product, in serviceLack of granular marketingInability to search & book specific product“tail on the dog”After air, hotel Search for a rental from Avis or Budget via a partner site like Priceline or Orbitz or American AirlinesAll we know is you when, where and for how long you need a carThat’s like trying to recommend a book only knowing where, when and for how long you want to read
Buddy:Better Industry Partner Integrationjoint, coordinated, intelligent customer servicingBetter Product / Service Differentiationopening “facets” of the productBetter Merchandising & Distributionsearch engine & other relevant forumsFinding rather than searchinggoal-base, requirements-based, profile-based presentationWe can recommend a bookIf it is known you like non-fiction, history, & politicsIn the same way we can FIND you a rental vehicle if we knowThe nature of the tripWho and how many are goingThe budgetHow much luggage
Buddy:Why Semantic Technology?Flexibilityin classification of assets and featuresin interoperability between partnersPowermeaning-based search as opposed to static workflow; meet customer intent, rather than merely criteriaAssociationunify and associate disparate data, such as mashups, customer data, fleet datafederate information from across heterogeneous sourcessell ancillary services based on knowledge of core purchaseMarketing and Merchandisinguse search engines as a reservation “front door”present product based on what we know about the customerturn the rental “incident” into an “experience”Semantics provides the mechanism to provide better resultsIt provides flexibility for Avis and Budget to change the recommendation without requiring partners to make code changes. Important when the install base is large and changes are infrequent.
Rob – Thematix built ….Offering ? And cap O
Rob:Can we add specific language examples:Did you want a sports car or a camaro specifically?Would you rather go to a different location or dates if the rates are lower, or stick with date/location
Rob:Suppliers can merchandise offerings in innovative ways, unique to the brand, that better fit customer needs and desires and differentiate from the competition. Take for example an airline wishing to allow the customer to search for “comfort oriented flights” that use certain attributes of the flight to create “synthetic categories” of availability. Here, key attributes such as leg room, media options, and other facts create a class of availabilities that offer greater comfort.One can imagine other ‘synthetic search’ scenarios, such as “disability friendly,” “commuter friendly,” “easiest connections” and the like.
Rob:Two primary factors in Search Engine IndexingRelevance – how many relevant searches will match your pagePage ranking – where in the ranking order does your page appearIf your page does not appear in the results of a relevant search, the page rank does not matterPage ranking scores have little to do with the language and meaning content of the pageConventional SEO is needed in addition to increased relevanceEnhance search across many search engines at once. Control the quality and criteria for relevance. Avoid the expense, upkeep and currency issues of intermediaries. As search engine functionality extends, take advantage of transactional as well as descriptive aspects of search results.Hilton could provide same as Pegasus. One point of leverage is semantics disintermediates aggregators.Ability to produce many more meaningful description tags – synonyms – that enhance relevance.-- provide results from Bing, Yahoo and Google as illustration-- not as good as it can be: we need to mock-up something even better.
Rob:
Buddy:Partners might be able to pass meaningful metadata, allowing partners to make decisions on the fly concerning the offers, based on what is learned about the customer in one stage of the process. Here, for example, Continental may be able to provide Avis with information about the travelers that allows Avis to determine that it is a family, with one spouse probably on business, that is relatively affluent and in need of a car rental with lots of storage and accommodations for children.Ancillary partners of either Avis or Continental might also be “activated” on that basis – allowing for offers related to events, meals, accommodations and even baby sitters.This kind of reasoning is possible without a need for “pre-packaging” or a static infrastructure for doing so – the “smarts” are in the data that is being passed between partners, rather than in intermediary systems.
Rob:Remove not the human kind:Industry-wide ontologies, starting with Car‘publishing’ availabilities in RDFa / microformatsFacilitate federated search and agents; publishing against criteriaLinked data mashupsSemantic SOA atypical non-sequential searches“atomic” information about car models
