Itinerary retrieval

Abstract

Internet users share large quantities of text and multimedia content that becomes easily accessible to others via hyperlinks and search engine results. However, structured datasets generally lack this level of exposure. One example is the travel itinerary, which many Internet users post online in the form of a spreadsheet or web page table, yet the collection of such itineraries remains difficult to search or browse due to insufficient parsing and indexing by search engines. Enabling interaction with user-uploaded itineraries could provide valuable information to trip planners who are researching travel options and to businesses attempting to understand travel patterns. This work examines the challenges of identifying and extracting itineraries from spreadsheets and web page tables to support such applications, with a focus on differentiating between itineraries and other documents with geographic content.

Flexible Trip-Planning Queries

“…Best itinerary-planning approaches, which require to specify the starting and ending point of the trip and a cost function such as minimum distance, minimum time, and/or qualitative aspects of the roads specified by query keywords [12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…Other itinerary retrieval models have been defined, for example supporting travel searches for an upcoming vacation so as to exploit advice and experiences of previous visitors [12,13]. These models rank routes to territorial resources in a collection of stored itineraries, either detected in GPS-crowdsourced track logs or automatically detected within tables, based on a measure of similarity with respect to a sequence of locations.…”