OWL ontology development for destination marketing

Abstract

Internet as a marketing medium in the tourism industry is a very valuable destination marketing tool. Different tourism authorities and organizations serve as marketing and service providers. They benefit from the use of Internet within the concept of marketing efforts. A new technology Semantic Web brought incremental changes by bringing machine-readable descriptions to current web interfaces of these organizations. This paper provides necessary framework for the applicability of Semantic Web technology on Destination Marketing. It creates a methodology on how web pages are created and analyzed with the value-added tourism marketing purposes. Semantic Web technology achieves such interoperability by referring to ontology models. The ontology presented here determines the value of this integration in destination marketing organizations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.