Semantic Web Empowered E-Tourism

Smart speakers such as Alexa and later Google Home have introduced Artificial Intelligence (AI) into millions, soon to be billions of households, making AI an everyday experience. These new communication channels present a new challenge for successful e-Marketing and e-Commerce providers. Data, content, and services are becoming semantically annotated, allowing software agents, so-called bots, to search through the web and understand its content. Nowadays, users typically consult their bot to find, aggregate, and personalize information and to reserve, book, or buy products and services. As a consequence, it is becoming increasingly important for touristic providers of information, products, and services to be prominently visible in these new online channels to ensure their future economic maturity. In our chapter, we survey the methods and tools helping to achieve these goals. The core aim is the development and application of machine-processable (semantic) annotations of content, data, and services, as well as their aggregation in large Knowledge Graphs. It is only through these methods bots are able to answer a question in a knowledgeable way and organize a useful dialogue (Knowledge Graphs in Use A significantly extended and generalized version of this article will appear as D. Fensel, K. Angele, E. Huaman, E. Kärle, O. Panasiuk, U. Şimşek, I. Toma, J. Umbrich, and A. Wahler: Knowledge Graphs: Methodology, Tools and Selected Use Cases. Springer Nature, 2020.).