The past decade has seen the Malaysian ecotourism industry, experiencing a process of reformation in implementation of best practice. This reflects the commitment by the Malaysian ecotourism industry to achieve the highest standards as well as an evolution of environmental management and performance standards required by regulating government agencies, including protected area managers.

The Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism’s Orchid Classification Scheme was formulated to accommodate those hotels, which do not meet the requirements or criteria for any star rating. Besides hotels, the scheme also classifies hostels, beds and breakfasts, inns, boarding houses, rest houses and ecolodges. The Orchid rating is awarded to tourist accommodation premises with basic facilities, which include good, safe and clean accommodation and friendly hospitable atmosphere.

In 1996, the Malaysian National Ecotourism Plan was developed by World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), Malaysia. Diagnostic lists of ecotourism sites were compiled. The factors used to classify ecotourism sites are based on the following:

• Current tourism status
• Accessibility and existing facilities
• Flagship potential
• Type of attractions and activities
• Staff manning the site
• Rehabilitation and recovery needs
• Gross carrying capacity
• Current management agency

ICT in ecotourism
Among the main problems in the current practice in ensuring sustainable development of the ecotourism industry in Malaysia are:

• Lack of effective sustainable management practice of the ecotourism site,
• Lack of enforcement in ensuring the ecosystem is sustained,
• Insufficient environmental cum ecological expertise that incorporates the fundamental of safety and health issues,
• Lack of consistent approaches in implementing a mitigation abatement measure and in satisfying the requirement of national environmental regulatory authorities,
• Large number of small organisation involved in tourism and their related fields make the effort to collect data from them both costly and time-consuming,
• Unreliable and incomplete ecotourism databases.

Thus, there is a need to develop and maintain a certain level of standards based on different levels of categorisation and rating to ensure the sustainability of these ecotourism sites. Accreditation and certification in the form of electronic rating (e-Rating) is one such approach. Using an Internet-based information-sharing platform, guided by the existing legislation on safety, health and environment, the ecotourism sites in Malaysia can be rated. Where no guidelines are available, recommendations based on the knowledge of human experts in this particular field or domain (domain experts), literature and field survey statistics can be incorporated to further enhance the knowledge based rating system. Previous studies like the diagnostic list of ecotourism sites in Malaysia, can be used in enhancing the ecotourism sites rating system.

A knowledge based system is a computer programme that reasons with knowledge of some specialist subject with a view to solving problems or giving advice. It is an intelligent computer programme that uses knowledge and inference procedures to solve problems that are difficult for human to solve.

Evaluation of ecorating site
Three groups of people that can rate ecotourism sites include:

• Visitors to the site,
• Operators or the party that is responsible in running and managing the site,
• Appointed auditors to check and balance the input.

Certifications, ecolabels and ecorating basically serve three purposes, namely:

• Stimulating tourism service providers to introduce improvements in their operations, aimed at greater environmental, economic, and social sustainability;
• Differentiating and distinguish tourism products and services that meet environmental, social, and economic standards beyond the level required by the legislation in force;
• Orienting consumers with regard to the sustainability characteristics of the tourism services available on the market.

Additionally, certifications, ecolabels and ecorating serve to promote and stimulate higher levels of sustainability and quality throughout the tourism sector, aside from enhancing the image of certified companies, with the commercial benefits that such enhancement brings. One such method of ecorating was developed by the Expert System Rating Group (ESRG) (http://esrg.edu.upm.edu.my) in Universiti Putra Malaysia. The project was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Malaysia (MOSTE) under the Intensified Research in Priority Area (IRPA) funding. The main objectives of the ecorating developed are as follows:

• To design, develop, test and implement an expert system to rate the ecotourism components consistently and reliably based on safety, health and environment;
• To create an ecotourism database in an information sharing platform;
• To extract the opinions of the domain expert, existing statistics and literature and field survey of people’s perception in order to produce a set of rules to enable the expert system to be used to make intelligent decision.