Towards the semantic web in e-tourism: can annotation do the trick?

Abstract

Semantic Web technology may support more advanced E-Commerce. Namely the representation of products and services in the form of ontologies will simplify the automated extraction and processing of explicit information and will make implicit information available for the discovery and comparison of offerings. One common assumption is that the Semantic Web can be made a reality by gradually augmenting the existing data (mainly HTML/XHTML) by ontological annotations, derived from the non-machine-readable content of today, and that the main limitation of today's Web is the "needle-inthe -haystack" problem: everything is on the Web, but we only have insufficient methods of finding and processing what's already there. In this paper, we (1) evaluate whether this assumption is appropriate for the tourism industry, (2) show, based on a quantitative analysis of Web content about Austrian accommodations, that even a perfect annotation of existing Web content would not allow the vision of the Semantic Web to become a short-term reality for tourism-related E-Commerce, and (3) discuss the implications of these findings for various types of E-Commerce applications that rely on the extraction of information from existing Web resource, and stress the importance of Semantic Web services technology for the Semantic Web.