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Towards cross-domain data analytics in tourism: a linked data based approach

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Abstract

The complexity of the social, political and economical settings in which tourism enterprises operate, increasingly require them to perform data analytics tasks that rely on data from various domains (e.g., economy, environmental sustainability). A survey of tourism practitioners performed in this study showed that although such cross-domain analytics are important, they are primarily performed by relying on manual data collection and aggregation, which is both time-consuming and error-prone. This paper investigates the suitability of Linked Data technologies to support data aggregation tasks needed for establishing such complex analytics systems. To that end, a prototypical implementation is developed that relies on Linked Data as a technological platform for integrating data from three major tourism data sources: TourMIS, World Bank and Eurostat. Enabled by this integrated data, the ETIHQ Dashboard for data analytics was implemented, the first visual data analytics system that supports cross-domain analytics over tourism, economic and sustainability indicators. An exploratory evaluation performed with practitioners shows that this Linked Data enabled system could potentially bring important improvements in terms of execution times and answer quality when compared to current manual approaches typically used by tourism practitioners in daily practice.

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Notes

  1. ETIHQ (Exposing Tourism Indicators as High Quality Linked Data)—http://www.etihq.eu/.

  2. The slides of the presentation are available online http://www.modul.ac.at/uploads/files/user_upload/Workshop_2014-Sabou-Onder.

  3. Participant comments from the survey are reproduced verbatim.

  4. http://tinyurl.com/etihqModels.

  5. https://github.com/ontop/ontop/wiki/ObdalibObdaFile.

  6. http://ontop.inf.unibz.it/.

  7. http://jena.apache.org/documentation/serving_data/.

  8. http://dbpedia.org/.

  9. http://www.geonames.org/.

  10. http://yasgui.laurensrietveld.nl/.

  11. https://github.com/cygri/pubby.

  12. username=demo@etihq.eu; password=etihqdemo.

  13. http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/.

  14. http://www.epimorphics.com/web/projects/bathing-waterquality.

  15. http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/.

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Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper was partly funded by the PlanetData project (FP7:ICT-2009.3.4, #257641). We thank Prof. Karl Wöber for his valuable contribution to this work. The main author performed parts of the work while employed at MODUL University Vienna. She was additionally supported by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft, the Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth, and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development—Austria. This work also received funding from the European Union, Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under Grant Agreement No 619706 (ASAP). The authors wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive comments which greatly helped improving this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Vienna, Taubstummengasse 11, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Marta Sabou

  2. MODUL University Vienna, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190, Vienna, Austria

    Irem Onder, Adrian M. P. Brasoveanu & Arno Scharl

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  1. Marta Sabou
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  2. Irem Onder
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  3. Adrian M. P. Brasoveanu
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  4. Arno Scharl
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Correspondence to Irem Onder.

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Sabou, M., Onder, I., Brasoveanu, A.M.P. et al. Towards cross-domain data analytics in tourism: a linked data based approach. Inf Technol Tourism 16, 71–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-015-0049-5

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