Abstract

Tourism is one of the most important economic sectors in Austria. Given the high internationality degree of Austrian visitors, the websites of regional tourism organizations (RTOs) are an essential source of information. A state-of-the-art tourism website should include semantic markup for touristic topics so that search engines and other intelligent software applications can access and understand the presented data. This paper empirically studies the usage of Semantic Web formats, ontologies and topics relevant for tourism on the websites of all 137 Austrian RTOs. Results show that 59% of the RTOs use semantic markup. Most regions adhere to the recommendations of leading search engines utilizing ontologies such as Schema.org and the formats Microdata and JSON-LD. While most semantic markup incorporates basic information (e.g. navigation, addresses, corporate data), only few Austrian RTOs annotate touristic relevant topics that would contribute to unlock the full potential of the Semantic Web such as regional events, accommodations, blog posts, images or social media.

Highlights

  • With nearly 45 million resident and non-resident guests in 2018, tourism is one of the most important Austrian economic sectors [1]

  • This paper empirically studies the usage of Semantic Web formats, ontologies and topics relevant for tourism on the websites of all 137 Austrian regional tourism organizations (RTOs)

  • This section contains the main findings of the survey on the use of Semantic Web technology by Austrian RTOs

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Summary

Introduction

With nearly 45 million resident and non-resident guests in 2018, tourism is one of the most important Austrian economic sectors [1]. The tourism regions, which are in the midst of the hierarchical organization of this industry in Austria, contribute significantly to the promotion of certain tourism destinations and to addressing a broad target group [4]. These regional tourism organizations (RTO) are given an important role in the possible weakening of dependence on international online travel agencies (OTA), which dominate the tourism market. One of the most important communication channels of a tourism organization is the website, which should adhere the current state-of-the-art In this context it has been recognized that innovative software providing interoperability through ontologies is critical for further innovation in the tourism industry [11]. Several researches have focused on the design of semantic vocabularies for the tourism and travel industry [17] (e.g. Harmonise [18], QALL-ME [19], cDott [20], Accommodation Ontology [21], Tourpedia [22])

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