The Status of Metadata Application to the Tourism Industry in Taiwan

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In the process of tourism industrial development, vast amount of knowledge will be produced. When knowledge accumulation reaches a certain level, knowledge integration and sharing will be needed. Multiple areas constitute tourism industry, such as catering, culture, ecology, and regulation, etc. Such great body of tourism-related knowledge is scattered and in need of proper integration to enable professionals to build up knowledge quickly, help travelers access to tourist information accurately, and benefit the entire tourism industry. Subject cataloging has long been developed and used by libraries to integrate domain knowledge. It has evolved into the concept of ”Metadata” after the popularization of computer information systems. Various fields of discipline are currently either setting up Metadata format or using Metadata to describe important information. In Taiwan, Academia Sinica established a Metadata Team in 1998 to assist description of museum objects. The same team takes responsibility for planning Metadata standards in fields such as language, visual data, audio and video files, and file management. The establishment of Metadata will create a standard to categorize information of all knowledge output in certain fields, and thus common search criteria of knowledge will result from collective work. The same concepts can be applied to tourism industry to organize industry-related knowledge. When a consistent classification of metadata parameters is adopted, tourist information of all kinds in Taiwan can be systematically organized. The retrieval of travel information will quicken and the retrieval rate of tour-related websites will therefore multiply. Metadata has been employed in libraries, museum, and digital data preservation so far. It is believed that tourism industry will also be benefitted from the application of Metadata. This paper aims to explore present status of application of Metadata in Taiwan. Current researches of Metadata in governmental agencies as well as in tourism industry will be reviewed. Future possible application of Metadata in tourism industry will be discussed and some suggestions made.