Hotels.com
In order to maximize the amount and quality of data extracted, the Sponger's support for Hotels.com comes in three forms: as a regular extractor cartridge, as a query-language cartridge and as a metacartridge.
Extractor Cartridge
This is used for modelling a single identified hotel object as RDF. Typical URL patterns take the form <http://www.hotels.com/hotel/details.html?hotelId=nnnnn>. In practice, such URLs rarely exist in the wild so we regard this as the canonical URL for a hotel and identify the pattern ?hotelId=nnnnn in other URLs accordingly.
Query-Language cartridge
The Sponger's Query-language cartridges are a subset of the extractor cartridges, defined as working against resources that are themselves queries. In this case, the hotels.com website allows a user to enter some free-form text to locate a hotel; we treat the URL as identifying a resultset and model that as a container linking to individual hotels.
Features differentiating this from other modes: if a new hotel is built tomorrow and matches the search, responging the same page will show new data dynamically; there is no hotelId in the URL to restrict the query to one hotel.
Metacartridge
The Sponger's metacartridges enhance data already present in a graph. In this case, the Hotels.com metacartridge searches for triples identifying a location in the graph and adds links showing hotels in the vicinity.
Configuration
The hotels.com cartridges are implemented using the Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) API. To use them, you need to sign up with EAN, register a new application and put the API key in the API key field in the sponger cartridge's configuration page in the Virtuoso Conductor.
Example:
Go to https://developer.ean.com/ and click `sign up' or sign in if already registered.
Click on `my account' and you should see an overview of your applications and their keys and secrets.
Go to the Virtuoso Conductor, e.g. http://localhost:8889/conductor/ (adjust host and port) and log in. In the menus, click Linked Data / Sponger and you'll see the extractor cartridges.
Ensure the Hotels.com extractor cartridge is enabled and apply. Then scroll down and select it, to change its settings:
Copy and paste the API Key from EAN into the cartridge configuration and update.
Next, in the sponger menu, go to the Metacartridges tab and similarly enable the cartridge and paste the key in its setings also.
