Towards Cross-Domain Decision Making in Tourism: A Linked Data Based Approach

The complexity of the socio-, political- and economical settings in which tourism enterprises operate, increasingly require them to make decisions that take into account data from various domains (e.g., economy, environmental sustainability). Based on a practitioners' survey that we performed, we conclude that although such cross-domain decisions are important, they are primarily performed by relying on manual data collection and aggregation, which is both time-consuming and error-prone. We propose a solution 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, we developed the ETIHQ Dashboard, the first visual decision support system that supports cross-domain decisions over tourism, economic and sustainability indicators. An evaluation performed with practitioners shows that this Linked Data enabled systems brings important improvements in terms of execution times (28% faster) and answer quality when compared to current manual approaches.