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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016 pp 99–112Cite as

Why Are There More Hotels in Tyrol than in Austria? Analyzing Schema.org Usage in the Hotel Domain

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Abstract

It has been almost 4 years now since the world’s leading search engine operators, Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex, decided to start working on an initiative to enrich web pages with structured data, known as schema.org. Since then, many web masters and those responsible for web pages started adapting this technology to enrich websites with semantic information. This paper analyzes parts of the structured data in the largest available open to the public web crawl, the Common Crawl, to find out how the hotel branch is using schema.org. On the use case of schema.org/Hotel, this paper studies who uses it, how it is applied and whether or not the classes and properties of the vocabulary are used in the syntactically and semantically correct way. Further, this paper will compare the usage based on numbers of 2013 and 2014 to find out whether or not an increase in usage can be noted. We observe a wide and growing distribution of schema.org, but also a large variety of erroneous and restricted usage of schema.org within the data set, which makes the data hard to use for real-life applications. When it comes to geographical comparison, the outcome shows that the United States are far in the lead with annotation of hotels with schema.org and Europe still has work to do to catch up.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.schema.org

  2. 2.

    http://commoncrawl.org

  3. 3.

    http://webdatacommons.org

  4. 4.

    http://vocab.cc/about.html

  5. 5.

    http://km.aifb.kit.edu/projects/btc-2012/

  6. 6.

    http://www.onlim.com

  7. 7.

    http://www.innsbruck.info

  8. 8.

    http://webdatacommons.org

  9. 9.

    http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2013-11/stats/schema org subsets.html

  10. 10.

    http://graphdb.ontotext.com/display/GraphDB6/GraphDB-SE

  11. 11.

    http://tomcat.apache.org/

  12. 12.

    http://rdf4j.org/

  13. 13.

    http://junit.org/

  14. 14.

    http://rdf4j.org/sesame/2.8/docs/articles/workbench.docbook

  15. 15.

    http://www.statistik.at/

  16. 16.

    https://www.ahla.com/content.aspx?id=36332

  17. 17.

    http://www.tnooz.com/article/how-many-hotels-in-the-world-are-there-anyway-booking-com-keeps-adding-them/

  18. 18.

    https://schema.org/Rating

  19. 19.

    http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2013-11/stats/stats.html

  20. 20.

    http://schema.org/version/2.0/

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by research projects, which are co-funded by FFG – TourPack (http://tourpack.sti2.at), ÖAD – LDCT (http://ldct.sti2.at), and European Commission in FP7 and H2020: BYTE (http://byte-project.eu) and EuTravel (http://www.eutravelproject.eu). The authors thank their colleagues for useful inputs, the reviewers for useful comments, and Amy Strub for proofreading of English.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Elias Kärle, Anna Fensel, Ioan Toma & Dieter Fensel

Authors
  1. Elias Kärle
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  2. Anna Fensel
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  3. Ioan Toma
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  4. Dieter Fensel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elias Kärle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Tourism, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom

    Alessandro Inversini

  2. HES-SO Valais, Sierre, Valais, Switzerland

    Roland Schegg

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Kärle, E., Fensel, A., Toma, I., Fensel, D. (2016). Why Are There More Hotels in Tyrol than in Austria? Analyzing Schema.org Usage in the Hotel Domain. In: Inversini, A., Schegg, R. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28231-2_8

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