Linked Data for Cross-Domain Decision-Making in Tourism

This paper has exposed tourism statistics from TourMIS, a core source of European tourism statistics, as linked data and used it subsequently to connect to other sources of indicators to enable cross-domain decision-making.

Abstract

In today's global economy, tourism managers need to consider a range of factors when making important decisions. Besides traditional tourism indicators (such as arrivals or bednights) they also need to take into account indicators from other domains, for example, economy and sustainability. From a technology perspective, building decision support systems that would allow inspecting indicators from different domains in order to understand their (potential) correlations, is a challenging task. Indeed, tourism (and other indicators), while mostly available as open data, are stored using database centric technologies that require tedious manual efforts for combining the data sets. In this paper we describe a Linked Data based solution to building an integrated dataset as a basis for a decision support system capable of enabling cross-domain decision-making. Concretely, we have exposed tourism statistics from TourMIS, a core source of European tourism statistics, as linked data and used it subsequently to connect to other sources of indicators. A visual dashboard explores this integrated data to offer cross-domain decision support to tourism managers.