Title: Complete Semantics to empower Touristic Service Providers,
Abstract: The tourism industry has a significant impact on the world's economy,
contributes 10.2% of the world's gross domestic product in 2016. It becomes a
very competitive industry, where having a strong online presence is an
essential aspect for business success. To achieve this goal, the proper usage
of latest Web technologies, particularly schema.org annotations is crucial. In
this paper, we present our effort to improve the online visibility of touristic
service providers in the region of Tyrol, Austria, by creating and deploying a
substantial amount of semantic annotations according to schema.org, a widely
used vocabulary for structured data on the Web. We started our work from
Tourismusverband (TVB) Mayrhofen-Hippach and all touristic service providers in
the Mayrhofen-Hippach region and applied the same approach to other TVBs and
regions, as well as other use cases. The rationale for doing this is
straightforward. Having schema.org annotations enables search engines to
understand the content better, and provide better results for end users, as
well as enables various intelligent applications to utilize them. As a direct
consequence, the region of Tyrol and its touristic service increase their
online visibility and decrease the dependency on intermediaries, i.e. Online
Travel Agency (OTA).