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.