Supporting Tourism Decision Making with Linked Data

Decision makers in the tourism domain routinely need to combine and compare statistical indicators about tourism and other related areas (e.g., economic). While many organizations offer relevant data sets, their automatic access and reuse is hampered (i) by them being offered as data dumps in non-semantic encodings; (ii) by them assuming some implicit knowledge that is necessary to build applications (e.g., that a city is situated in a certain country) and (iii) by the use of incompatible ways to measure the same indicator without formally specifying the assumptions behind the measurement technique. We explore the use of linked data technologies to solve these issues by triplifying the content of TourMIS, a broadly used data source of European tourism statistics and by building a prototype system using this data.