Measuring Tourism Managers’ Information Needs by Tracking and Analyzing the TourMIS Web Site Statistics

The aim of the work is to provide a front-end to a statistical database, that will make available to the user the information required to choose relevant data from the database and interpret it correctly.

Abstract

This article describes a study of the use of knowledge engineering techniques to improve access to statistical data. The access problems that the study confronts are those where the potential user lacks detailed knowledge of the available data, either technical knowledge related to the production of the statistics or an accurate conceptual model of the knowledge domain. The aim of the work is to provide a front-end to a statistical database, that will make available to the user the information (secondary or meta-data) required to choose relevant data from the database and interpret it correctly. The database is a collection of tourism statistics that has been created by the Austrian National Tourist Office in close collaboration with the Institute for Tourism and Leisure Studies at the Vienna University for Economics. The online hypertext database is called TourMIS and was used during a period of 12 months by 256 tourism managers. The paper sets out the framework in which the study is taking place, the methodology used and possible implications.