Usage of Semantic Web in Austrian Regional Tourism Organizations

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.

Semantic Web Usage in the Tourism Industry in Andalusia, Spain

“…The results show that 57 % of examined sites used semantic markup, in which only 5 websites had marked up 85% of the semantic annotations while the usage of total annotations in each of the 32 remaining websites did not exceed 3 percent. Observed figures are similar to those found in a previous study for Austrian regions (Lohvynenko& Nedbal, 2019).…”

“…A previous study on 133 Austrian regional tourism organizations indicated that 59% of subjects used semantic web annotations in their web sites and the rest did not used any semantic markups. In addition, the result shows that the top 20 regions make 89% of the total amount of semantic markups (Lohvynenko& Nedbal, 2019). Smart tourism ontologies can provide big advances in tourism organization and development that worth to investigate (Navío-Marco et al, 2018).…”

L’impact de la prise en charge des couches sémantiques sur la recherche d'information touristique : Cas des établissements et services touristiques digitalisés au Maroc

“…L'annotation sémantique de données structurées sur un site web est l'une des pratiques d'optimisation des moteurs de recherche les plus courantes, qui est également recommandée par les principaux moteurs de recherche. Elle peut donc accroître la visibilité en ligne de la page web et les chiffres de vente sur internet (Lohvynenko & Nedbal, 2019). Les ontologies sont une composante essentielle du web sémantique pour représenter, traiter et partager les connaissances dans différents domaines.…”