Exposing Tourism Indicators as High Quality Linked Data

Although the tourism domain heavily relies on complex decision making, it currently lacks decision support systems with the capability to seamlessly integrate and visualise data from multiple data sources of tourism (and other) indicators. Linked Data technologies, by contrast, especially when adopted at large scale, greatly facilitate data integration at the syntactic and semantic level alike by providing a uniform data encoding format. Such technologies also help to clearly specify the meaning of the data and to establish links between various datasets. In this project we will use Linked Data technologies to create a reference repository of tourism indicators (ETIHQ) by exposing the content of TourMIS, a major source of European tourism statistics, as high-quality Linked Data.

We will ensure data quality by providing semantically rich vocabularies that will support (i) the specification of the meaning of tourism statistics and (ii) the provenance of the data items. To demonstrate the benefits of using Linked Data, we will design and implement a decision support system that makes use of the ETIHQ repository and leverages its detailed semantic specifications to provide appropriate access control mechanisms.