Semantic Web Usage in the Tourism Industry in Andalusia, Spain

Abstract

Andalusia got the 4th place of tourists’ favorite destinations among 17 autonomous communities in Spain in September 2023 and almost returned to pre-pandemic normality regarding tourism. Although Spain is famous for its “sun and beach”, its tourist industry is facing new challenges in socio-economic, environmental and territorial issues; therefore, the role of artificial intelligence cannot be ignored in the evolution and transformation of the tourism business. AI algorithms reinforce decision-making capabilities through analysing real-time data. Effectiveness and efficiency of AI algorithms are dependent on well-structured, well-described and machine-readable meta data network which can be provided by Semantic Web standards. This article empirically study the current usage of Semantic Web formats, ontologies and touristic topics in 65 tourist-relevant web sites in Andalusia. Results show that just 57 % of examined sites used semantic markup with most of the semantic annotations (98.5%) made in three formats: Microdata, JSON-LD and RDFa. Furthermore, the Ontologies used in almost 90% of markups are ‘Schema.org’, ‘Data Vocabulary’ and ‘RDF’, but none of the special tourism ontologies appeared in examined tourism web sites. Therefore, Andalusia tourism websites should be enhanced with much more widespread Semantic Web in order to achieve a better performance in a future in which AI technologies will be widespread.