Elisa Kendall, Partner at Thematix, and Mark Linehan of IBM Research have authored a proposed mapping of the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (“SVBR”) to OWL2. The work is significant, insofar as a growing number of large businesses are increasingly relying on SVBR to describe their business processes.  The OWL version will simplify the process of description and provide a richer set of tools and, for the first time, an ability to reason over a business model to determine consistency and entailment. IBM is hosting the mapping, which is described at their site thusly: This paper proposes a mapping …

Thematix has released a draft of extensions to Schema.org that would enable hoteliers to better describe their offerings to search engines.  The extensions are designed to allow descriptions of such things as amenities, services, rooms and room rates — none of which is possible today using the existing taxonomy at Schema.org. This is important insofar as Thematix has already demonstrated that even the existing markup capabilities can significantly enhance search engine presence for hotels.  The extensions — if widely adopted and honored by search engines — would further enhance the utility of search engines by allowing searchers to, for example, …

[This post originally appeared as "Why you need to care about travel technology, semantic web and ontology" in the January 3, 2012 edition of Tnooz.] The Open Travel Alliance just published its version 2011B XML Schema specification with many new enhancements and additions.  The OpenTravel specification can be used to more easily build software that is interoperable with disparate travel systems.  Earlier this year, OpenTravel green-lighted a new project to produce a car rental ontology, building upon components donated by Avis Budget Group as constructed by Thematix, a member of the Open Travel Alliance.  What does this mean for the Travel …