Cheap flights and great holiday offers proliferate travel sites on the Internet, but how often has your search either yielded no match or a flight or holiday that is five times the normal price?

This frustration could soon be reduced if a new research project in University College Cork (UCC) succeeds in tackling the limited search capabilities of travel databases.

The Knowledge Engineering Group at UCC has received around £100,000 funding from Enterprise Ireland to develop two projects using case-based reasoning.

Often, Internet users searching for a holiday get a blank response to a query incorporating their specific preferences.

With the case-based reasoning system being developed at UCC, the search engine would give users a result that would include at least some of the elements they were looking for.

The idea behind case-based reasoning is that finding a similar solution to a similar problem based on solutions to past problems is better than finding no solution at all.

Dr Derek Bridge says the group is creating ways of computing similarity. There is an intelligence built into the search engine that identifies similarities between a query and holidays available.

If there is no direct match, then results with at least some of the preferences that a user has inputed will come up.

Users of the system will then be able to go into these other similar search results and modify the specifications to suit their needs and see if they can get the package they want.

The case-based archive will also be able to search giving different priority to whatever preference is most important to the customer, such as price, date, location or duration of a holiday or trip .

Entreprise Ireland's strategic research scheme has funded research at UCC into a second system aimed at software developers.

With a huge number of programs being written and applications developed by programmers and developers, both in companies and academic institutions, there is a growing need to archive the fruits of their labours.

Libraries of code are being constructed by companies and Web developers to make past work accessible.

The UCC team is aiming to develop a system that would search these virtual software catalogues for developers as they work on software designs.

At the moment developers are only able to compare their designs when they have finished designing their programs with other software.

The UCC project is aiming to build a tool that would show developers other designs that are similar to the software architectures they are creating.

The tool will be similar in concept to the pop-up office assistant in Windows, which advises users on actions they could take.

Dr Bridge's team hopes to do something similar with the much more complex area of software design, using Unified Modelling Language, which is a standard way in which software engineers can communicate.

The system hopes to capture diagrammatically the actions of the person using a software tool so that these processes can be recorded and used to help others.

Dr Bridge says case-based reasoning is a complementary system, but it can handle an average of 80 per cent of queries.

Similar case-based technology has been used widely in help desks in many areas of industry.

Because many of those manning the help desks are often not experts in the field, they may have to refer certain problems to technicians regularly.

However, with case-based reasoning the solutions to these problems or similar problems can be retrieved by the help desk without referring to the technicians.

The knowledge engineering group has already developed software in conjunction with the Nautical Enterprise Centre, a Cork-based business maritime and transportation technology consultancy.

Using a knowledge database of ferry routes, ferry sailing times, ports and world geography, the application was designed to plan cargo transportation routes.

Instead of hours of complex planning with schedules, timetables and distances, the system devised the few most suitable routes in seconds.