Specisoft has submitted a proposal under the action “RESEARCH AND INNOVATION SYNERGIES IN THE REGION OF ATTICA” jointly with the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens / School of Medicine, Laboratory of Physiology, which involves the creation of an expert system for Thermal-spa tourism.
In particular, the Thermal-spa tourism expert system answers citizens with particular medical data as to which thermal spring to visit for their condition, what benefit they will have, and the particular features of accommodation and tourist benefit. The system will work as follows: citizens, through the platform of the expert system, will ask and receive answers about their condition. Indicatively, the person concerned will enter their condition in the system, answer questions put by the system (e.g. whether they have underlying diseases, allergies etc.) and receive answers on the most suitable springs, as well as information on accommodation and tourist interest.
It is known that the use of Artificial Intelligence methods, and in particular of expert systems, in Medicine and in Tourism is a very wide field of applications that has yielded significant, usable results. Expert systems are computer programs like any ordinary computer program, yet they display “intelligent” behaviour in specific fields of knowledge, comparable to that of a human expert in the same field.
An expert system consists of the knowledge base, containing the knowledge elicited by the knowledge engineer from the domain expert, and the inference engine. Developing an expert system, such as the one Specisoft is undertaking, requires the cooperation of a human expert in the domain of the problem the system is called upon to solve with a knowledge engineer. The expert contributes the domain knowledge needed for the system to work, and the knowledge engineer is responsible for representing the knowledge elicited from the expert so that it can be accessed and processed by the expert system program.
The way knowledge is represented is fundamental to the operation of the system, and in particular of the inference engine, and should be as independent as possible of the domain of the problem the system is called upon to solve. The representation and organisation of knowledge in general, the way knowledge is elicited from the expert and the overall management of the base are the responsibility of the knowledge engineer. In addition, tourist information per area and spring will be classified and made available.
The software platform of the Expert system, bearing Specisoft’s signature, will also contain algorithms able to indicate where a patient should go and what tourist services will be available, as well as options for selecting and creating holiday packages for use by tourism professionals, to create holiday products with specialised features. The commercial exploitation of the Thermal-spa tourism expert system will take place through the founding of a company to create Thermal-spa tourism packages and sell them in Greece and abroad.