WEB KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL AND

MEDIUM-SIZE ENTERPRISES

WebTour: A Case Study From the Tourism Sector

María M. Abad-Grau

ViveGranada S.L.L. and department of Software Engineering, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Francisco Araque

Department of Software Engineering, University of Jaén, Jaén, Spain

Rosana Montes, M. Visitación Hurtado, Miguel J. Hornos

Department of Software Engineering, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Keywords: Value-Added Services, Web-Based Services, Web Knowledge Management, Decision Support System,

Data Warehousing, On-Line Analysis Processing.

Abstract: The current enterprise world has become global and complex. Knowledge management is a key to have a

competitive advantage as it allows detecting in advance customer trends and market evolution. While

knowledge management systems are usually unaffordable for small or even medium-size enterprises, a tool

to be shared between them is a more realistic solution. The system, based on client/server architecture with a

web interface, is able to provide top Information Technology (IT) solutions for a low cost so that small and

medium business can also use these systems to acquire competitive advantage. We have developed a

solution for a IT enterprise providing an on-line reservation system for small tourist lodgings and travel

agencies. It consists of a Data Warehouse (DW) and a Decision Support System (DSS) which is currently

being offered as a value-added service for providers and customers. The DSS is also used by the Acquisition

Component of a Knowledge Management System (KMS).

1 INTRODUCTION

Most of the Small and Medium-size Enterprises

(SMEs) cannot afford sophisticated information

systems for strategic decision making process. Even

the data cannot be organised in order to easily

accomplish queries from the point of view of

business executives. Therefore, DW, DSS and KBS

are not yet common systems in many SMEs. The

lack of strategic resources is currently one of the

main causes for these companies to loose

competitive advantage. Even worse, for very

dynamic business, large enterprises can take over

SMEs just because of the difference in the

development of software tools for strategical

purpose.

To face this problem, SMEs have basically two

solutions: (1) to create strategic alliances so that

costs for these systems to be developed can be

shared and (2) to choose a provider able to offer

knowledge management as a value-added service.

Both solutions are now more than never before

technically feasible. By using a web-enabling

implementation, they are also more affordable, and

easy to use.

In this work we introduce a practical solution for

small or medium-size business to share knowledge

management software, so that they can compete with

larger enterprises. These systems, which have been

called Web Knowledge Based System (KBS) or

Web KMS (Bartenstein et al., 2003), are based on a

DW and they are able to provide knowledge

management by using DSS and/or data mining tools

239

M. Abad-Grau M., Araque F., Montes R., Visitación Hurtado M. and J. Hornos M. (2006).

WEB KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZE ENTERPRISES - WebTour: A Case Study From the Tourism Sector.

In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - DISI, pages 239-244

DOI: 10.5220/0002487402390244

 SciTePress

through a client/server architecture with a web

interface. Opposite to just data warehousing, which

reduces the creation of massive data, a new step in

these systems includes development of tools for

these data to be interpreted and the opportunity for

the companies to create value from their intangible

assets. Information from several sources, such as

data bases, IT web pages, e-business, e-commerce,

on-line transactions, etc. is transformed into

knowledge to take full advantage of the current huge

amounts of data.

The solution that we present has already been

implemented and it is actually being offered to more

than 400 tourist SMEs, as a value-added service

provided by ViveGranada S.L.L., an on-line

reservation center for small tourist lodgings in

Spain. Other enterprises belonging to completely

different business sectors can make use of these

systems, either for IT enterprises to provide as a

value-added service to their customer SME or for

any SME to adopt as a solution to be shared among

other enterprises in the same branch. The global

connectivity provided by a web-based system allows

SMEs to establish strategic alliances with similar

enterprises that can reside in different countries and

have different markets, so that they are not

competitors. As an example belonging to the tourism

sector, SMEs providing lodging, as vacation rentals,

rural houses or small hotels can share costs if they

share not only an on-line reservation system but a

web KMS. If they provide lodgings from different

geographical points, they are not competitors but

strategic partners.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2

contains an introduction to web KMSs. In Section 3

we describe in detail WebTour, the web KMS that

we have proposed to ViveGranada and that we have

already implemented, as a case study of how these

systems can be used for SMEs to achieve

competitive advantage. Moreover, a description of

the main subsystems to be used by SMEs, the

reservation Data Mart (DM) and the DSS, is

provided. Finally, the conclusions and future work

are given in Section 4.

2 WEB KNOWLEDGE

MANAGEMENT

A Web Knowledge Management System refers to

the Knowledge Management that is accomplished by

using a client/server architecture and a web

interface, so that access from every Internet-access

point, no matter the operative system or the web

browser, is possible without software installation.

2.1 Knowledge Management

Knowledge management has different meanings

depending on the field. From an IT point of view,

the one in this paper, it refers to more advanced

systems than standard information systems able to

assist the enterprises to acquire knowledge from

information. In contrast, from the point of view of

the social and financial sciences, knowledge

management refers primarily to assessing, changing

and improving human individual skills and/or

behaviour (Sveiby, 2001).

Although knowledge management is a very wide

concept, all KMSs and the more specific Expert

Systems (Castillo et. al, 1997) have in common to be

made up of at least three components: the

Knowledge Base, in which data and rules are stored,

an Inference Mechanism, in order for the system to

produce new knowledge and an Acquisition

Component, to feed up the Knowledge Base.

In order to build reusable information systems,

able to share data and components, they can be

related in a layer architecture, in which a KMS will

be in the external layer while a Data Base

Management System (DBMS) will be in the core.

On top of the DBMS, in the second layer, a DW

models the data to corporate standard and fulfils the

reporting requirements or demands of decision

makers, ensuring that data to be used are clean and

consistent. The capabilities of DW to provide a large

amount of relevant and pre-calculated information,

together with the fact that Internet has grown to

become a major media for information diffusion in

any organization can have positive impacts on

decision performance. In the third layer we can have

models and analytical tools specifically designed in

order to assist in decision making, so that we will

have a DSS. A DSS is a computer program

application that analyses business data and presents

it so that users can make business decisions by using

knowledge automatically generated from it. Typical

information that a decision support application

might gather and present would be comparative sales

figures between one week and the next, projected

revenue figures based on new product sales

assumptions and the consequences of different

decision alternatives, given past experience in a

context that is described. A DSS may present

information graphically.

In the fourth layer there will be a Knowledge

Base, an Acquisition Component, used to add

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knowledge to a Knowledge Base from the DSS and

an Inference Mechanism used in order to obtain new

knowledge upon the Knowledge Base, all of them

making up the KMS. The Acquisition Component

must be able to incorporate information to the

Knowledge Base each time an executive makes use

of the stored information for decision making.

2.2 Web Enabling Application

These applications are based on a client/server

architecture that describes two processes. The first is

the proactive client that sends requests to the server.

The server process is the reactive portion of the

system that does nothing but processes requests from

client. As we want a web-enabled KMS, we would

still have a client/server application. The Internet is

just a specific type of client/server implementation.

Figure 1: Web interface for a KMS.

Figure 1 shows the web interface for a KMS. The

browser is the presentation layer of the application.

Through it the user communicates with the Web

server. Since the Web server directly communicates

with the browser, the client system is invisible to the

application. Any client capable of supporting a

browser can access any Web-enabled client. The

strategist would click on the report icon that causes

the browser to send a URL (Uniform Resource

Locator) to the DW's Web server. The URL contains

the reference to a Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

to a script or computer program able to access the

data. Upon receiving the result, the web server

converts the report into HTML, which is passed to

the browser on the client.

By web-enabling the KBS we shift the

processing from the client to the server. The client

simply runs the browser. The processing of the data

is done back on the server. Also, the client's actual

hardware and software are invisible to the

application scripts.

Shifting the processing from the client to the

server has other important benefits. Most of them

translate into cost reduction, as a reduced

administration and maintenance or an easy

distribution of data. Others regard with the

willingness of a user to use specific software, as the

intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) that has the

web.

3 WEBTOUR: A WEB KMS FOR

TOURISM ENTERPRISES

We provide a case study of an IT company focused

on the tourist sector. Some specific solutions for this

sector have been proposed in order to integrate

different information systems (Kirkgöze & Tjoa,

1998) or to use a DW to help in the decision making

process (Haller et al., 2000). However, integral

solutions for this sector seem to be less frequent.

The enterprise, ViveGranada S.L.L., has developed

an on-line availability and reservation system of

lodgings owned by SMEs. Their providers, about

200 SMEs, benefit of an e-commerce system for a

low cost that can be used by travel agencies all over

the world or by end users. They provide also,

through an extranet, other e-business services,

including account and invoice management,

electronic fund transfer and a query system to obtain

information about reservations and payments.

WebTour is a web KMS made up of several

subsystems interconnected as it is shown in Figure 2

and described in this section. ViveGranada offers to

their providers, the owners of tourist lodgings,

access to one of the DMs already implemented, a

DM focused on the reservation systems and to the

DSS. This is offered as a value-added service. Other

DMs, as human resources, suppliers and Customer

Relationship Management (CRM) are planned to be

developed in the next phase.

3.1 The DW

The advantages of using DW are a better knowledge

of the business, the possibility of improving the

service to customers, a better awareness of the

business risks, and an improvement of the business

processes, being able to make more tailor-made

products and services.

Inmon (2002) defined a DW as “a subject-

oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile

collection of data in support of management’s

decision-making process.” A DW is a database that

stores a copy of operational data whose structure is

optimized for query and analysis. By definition, the

scope of a DW is the entire enterprise. Related to a

more reduced scope, a DM has to be used, which is a

highly focused DW and its scope is a single

WEB KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZE ENTERPRISES - WebTour: A Case Study

From the Tourism Sector

241

department or subject area. The DW and DMs are

usually implemented using relational databases

(Hammer et al., 1995), (Harinarayan et al., 1996)

defining multidimensional structures.

In a generic architecture of a DW (Chaudhuri &

Dayal, 1997), data sources include existing

operational databases and flat files (i.e., spreadsheets

or text files) in combination with external databases.

The data are extracted from the sources and then

loaded into the DW using various data loaders and

ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools (Araque &

Samos, 2003). The DW is then used to populate the

various subject (or process) oriented DMs and On-

Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) servers. DMs

are subsets of a DW categorized according to

functional areas depending on the domain (problem

area being addressed) and OLAP servers are

software tools that help a user to prepare data for

analysis, query processing, reporting and data

mining. The entire DW then forms an integrated

system that can support various reporting and

analysis requirements of the decision-making

function.

There are two approaches to build a DW. In the

first approach, stand-alone DMs assigned to

individual business units or processes are developed

and later integrated into an enterprise-wide DW. In

the second approach, a complete DW made up of

distributed DMs is built. These DMs are populated

with data either at the time of initial development or

at different stages depending on the availability of

time and resources (Inmon, 2002), (Kimball & Ross,

2002). The first approach is adopted by WebTour as

it fits with the scope of this research. However, in

the first phase of WebTour, already concluded, the

reservation DM has been the only one that was

developed.

The DW is built in MySQL, a relational database

with a web-based interface. The database, different

from the operational databases of ViveGranada, is

composed of 25 tables.

The DW extracts information on a daily basis

from two operational databases of ViveGranada, one

implemented with MySQL and the other being

implemented by a proprietary system. Extraction is

automatically done.

The main functionality of a Web-enabled DW

allows specialists to access specific data as a report

after querying the DW. Following the star schema of

the reservation DM, there are two types of tables in a

DM: the fact table and a set of dimension tables.

Figure 2: Architecture of WebTour.

The DM design essentially consists of three steps

as follows (Kimball & Ross, 2002):

1. Identifying facts and dimensions. Facts represent

quantitative (or factual) data about a business

entity, while dimensions contain descriptive data

that reflect the dimensions of that entity.

2. Designing fact and dimension tables. The

dimension tables are connected with the fact

table by foreign keys. As a result, a fact table

contains facts and foreign keys to the dimension

tables.

3. Designing DM schemas. The schema is a

database design containing the logic and showing

relationships between the data organized in

different tables (or relations). A DM is composed

of a central fact table and a set of surrounding

dimension tables.

The fact table is the reservation table, so that

each fact in this DM corresponds to a lodging

reservation. The application web interface includes

the possibility to query directly these tables to see

their contents. Also we can create and destroy

grouping conditions that define new entries.

Grouping conditions are stored in a GP-table (there

is one for each dimension table) which plays an

important role in the final report. The user must

specify a field of that table, a condition to be

imposed on the field and the name of the grouping.

As an example, the form to create a group can be

filled in order to create a group for those lodgings

that have swimming pool. The name of the new

group could be WithSwimmingPool and the group

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condition is imposed on the Boolean field

Swimming Pool of dimension table Lodging.

The OLAP server is accessed by using scripts. In

a report only dimension tables and its associated GP-

tables can be used. Using a form, the user decides

which of them to choose. With a PHP script, the

HTML page will show a field list for the previous

tables so that the user can select the fields to include

in the report as well as the grouping condition.

3.2 The DSS and KMS

The use of new technology, such as Data

Warehousing, Decision Support Systems, Data

Mining, data integration, etc., has been proposed

previously in many fields, not only in tourism. Thus,

some applications of these technologies are, for

example: the use of DWs and Data Mining as a basis

for strategic decision in tourism (Kirkgöze & Tjoa,

1998); the integration of heterogeneous tourist

information data sources using a three-tier

architecture, consisting of a Data Source Adapter

Layer, a Mediation Layer and a Client Layer (Haller

et al., 2000); and the application of DW and

Decision Support System in Soaring site

recommendation (Araque et al., 2006).

The purpose of the DSS is to enable analysts to

easily extract information. The system has to

provide a way to analyse data depending on the user

profile. For experienced users with a clear idea of

the contents of the DM, the system allows them to

develop ‘ad hoc’ parametric queries. In contrast, for

novel users, the system provides a set of high-

interest predefined queries. There are also other

criteria affecting the type of queries that the system

allows. One of them regard with costs and it

includes mainly computational time — the allowable

time to run a query — and space — the total number

of information that can be returned from a query —

(Chau et al., 2002).

These two criteria have been taken into account

by the DSS of WebTour. While no restriction is

imposed to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and

Chief Information Officer (CIO) of ViveGranada,

for all other staff and the providers only predefined

queries to the DSS with a limited quantity of time

and information to be displayed are allowed.

Figure 3 shows the DSS form to develop

parametric queries. A graphical report given by the

WebTour DSS is shown in Figure 4. It corresponds

to a query about the average number of individual

per reservation, considering the origin country of the

travel agency that made the reservation and the

location (province) of the tourist lodging.

In addition, the user interface for the DSS of

WebTour has been designed to provide end users

with a comfortable and easy to use environment

One of the most important attractions of this

interface is its ability to make dynamically queries,

to aggregate and analyse data, and to present and

visualise results.

Once a DSS returns a report to a query, the

Acquisition Component of the KMS receives also

the information and the executive must select the

output variable representing the decision making

process s/he is working on. The KBS is a

probabilistic one (Castillo et. al, 1997) as it uses a

Bayesian network instead of rules in the Knowledge

Base. For each type of decision, i.e. for each class or

output variable, a new Bayesian classifier will be

created. The Inference Mechanism will allow the

user to decide if a feature selection mechanism is

required and to choose among different architectures

for Bayesian classifiers. Accuracy in knowledge

acquisition has been probed for different Bayesian

classifiers in order to decide relationships between

Operation Strategy and Flexibility in engineering

consulting firms (Abad-Grau & Arias-Aranda,

2006).

4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

We have proposed the use of shared web KMS as an

affordable way to provide knowledge management

for SMEs, by means of strategic alliances or as a

value-added service provided by IT providers.

As future work, we plan to use other data mining

engines in order for the Acquisition Component to

directly obtain information from the DW. In

addition, we plan to investigate methods to

incorporate more sources of information into a DW

as XML or other semi-structured sources. While it is

getting more common to find web sites which output

information from their databases in XML code for

consumption by a variety of agents or applications,

to read XML documents and to integrate that

information into databases is not a trivial task.

WEB KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZE ENTERPRISES - WebTour: A Case Study

From the Tourism Sector

243

Figure 3: A DSS form for a parametric query of the KMS

WebTour.

Figure 4: Plot returned by the DSS system for the

parametric query in Figure 3.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been supported by the Spanish

CICYT projects TIN2005-09098-C05-03 (research

program PRONTIN), TIN2004-08000-C03-02

(research program AMENITIES), TIN2004-07672-

C03-02 and the travel agency ViveGranada S.L.L.

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