Tourpedia App: A Web Application for Tourists and Accommodation

Owners

Angelica Lo Duca

and Andrea Marchetti

Institute of Informatics and Telematics, National Research Council, via G. Moruzzi, 2, Pisa, Italy

Keywords: Web Applications, Tourism, Open Data.

Abstract: We set out a strategy to add missing details to Tourpedia, a knowledge base containing accommodation

information completely built on open data. The strategy is based on developing a Web application (called

Tourpedia App), which incentivizes accommodation owners to correct and add information about their

activity to Tourpedia. Valuable statistics about the accommodation context are returned to every

accommodation owner, compiling missing details. Tourists can also use the Tourpedia App to search for

accommodation and tourist attractions. The paper describes the strategy implemented to incentivize

accommodation owners to release information about their activity. In addition, it describes how Tourpedia

App is implemented and how tourists and accommodation owners can use it. The main finding of this study

is the implementation of the Tourpedia App, a prototype that demonstrates that it is possible to build real

applications based on open data.

1 INTRODUCTION

Tourism is one of the most important aspects of the

economy of a country such as Italy. To confirm this,

a study by The World Travel & Tourism Council

(WTTC) states that in 2017 the total contribution of

the tourism industry to the Italian economy was 223.2

billion euros, equal to 13% of the national GDP,

generating 14.7% of total employment in the country.

Furthermore, in Italy, the contribution of the tourism

sector to the GDP was higher than both the European

(10.3% of GDP) and the global average (10.4% of

GDP). This means that for Italy, it is very important

to invest resources in this sector.

This paper extends Tourpedia (Lo Duca and

Marchetti, 2019), a knowledge base regarding

tourism accommodation facilities (hotels, bed &

breakfast, …), built on open data extracted from

regional government agencies of three countries:

Italy, France, and Spain. Open data are datasets

released through a public license, which permits their

reuse and redistribution. So the main contribution of

Tourpedia has been to build a new larger dataset,

originated by integrating trustworthy resources,

which can be redistributed.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5252-6966

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4512-1642

The specific contribution of this paper involves

the following aspects: 1) enriching Tourpedia with

tourist attractions; 2) evaluating the quality of data

contained in Tourpedia in terms of missing

information and errors; and 3) defining a strategy to

improve the data quality. This strategy is based on

creating a Web application for accommodation

owners, termed Tourpedia App, which allows them to

check the information associated with their hotels and

add any missing details; 4) multilingualism

management.

Often, open data released by official government

agencies are not exploited by anyone, thus, they

remain on the owner's Website. Tourpedia could

become a place where official government agencies

disseminate their open data regarding tourism. Thus

data becomes more accessible, visible, and

exploitable.

Hoteliers and general users can use the Tourpedia

App. Hoteliers can register their hotels in the

Tourpedia App to access some statistics. These

statistics include the presence of tourists in the hotels

in the same municipality/region, the type of hotels

selected by tourists, the number of tourists per travel

category, and the number of Internet reservations.

446

Lo Duca, A. and Marchetti, A.

Tourpedia App: A Web Application for Tourists and Accommodation Owners.

DOI: 10.5220/0012231100003584

In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2023), pages 446-453

ISBN: 978-989-758-672-9; ISSN: 2184-3252

Transport means used to travel and other related

information. All these statistics define the

accommodation context. As a side effect, the

inclusion by the hoteliers of information relating to

their activity allows Tourpedia to enrich the dataset

relating to accommodation facilities with the missing

information.

General users can also use the Tourpedia App to

search for hotels close to a particular tourist

attraction. Tourpedia App constitutes an alternative

system to other commonly used search engines such

as Google and Booking because it is based entirely on

open data. Open data may contain accommodations

and attractions not present on online travel agencies.

Thus, users using the Tourpedia App could have

additional information. At the moment, the Tourpedia

App contains Italian, French, and Spanish

accommodations and Italian tourist attractions.

Statistics are available only for Italian hoteliers.

However, they can be easily extended to other

countries, provided that such countries have released

open data statistics.

The remainder of the paper is organized as

follows: Section 2 describes related work, and

Section 3 illustrates the Tourpedia Knowledge Base.

Section 4 illustrates the Tourpedia App and its

implementation. Finally, Section 6 gives conclusions.

2 RELATED WORK

2.1 Data Quality Improvement

Many strategies exist in the literature to improve the

data quality of knowledge bases. According to Heiko

Paulheim, there are two main objectives of

knowledge graph refinement: a) completion, which

involves adding missing information, and error

detection, which identifies wrong information

(Paulheim 2017). The present paper tries to fulfill the

completion objective by applying an alternative

technique. Thus in the remainder of the section, only

this aspect is investigated.

Completion can be achieved in two ways: a)

internal methods, which exploit only the information

contained in the knowledge base through Machine

Learning algorithms, and b) external methods, which

use information extracted from other sources. For a

complete survey about complete, please refer to the

previously cited paper (Paulheim, 2017). Other work

determines completion based on query terms to the

knowledge base (Jiang et al. 2019).

This paper describes an external method for

knowledge base completion, based on the support of

accommodation owners’, who will add missing

information directly to the knowledge base.

2.2 Hotel Statistics

The problem of providing hoteliers with useful

information to improve their business is well-known

in the literature (e.g., Torres et. al. 2014, Chen et al.

2019, Xia et al., 2019). One of the most important

topics in this field regards hotel rating, which

concerns the global hotel evaluation, according to

some metrics. The literature on this aspect is vast:

some works concentrate specifically on hotel rating

(e.g., Casalo et al., 2105, Mariani et al., 2018,

Narangajavana, 2008), and others analyze the impact

of hotel reviews on customer satisfaction (e.g.,

Vermeulen 2009, Berezina, 2016) and hotel

performance (Phillips et al. 2017). There are also

many websites providing hotels with statistics about

their reputation/rating. Some examples include

ReviewPro, TrustYou and Olery. All these vendors

elaborate great amounts of reviews from different

sources to define their metrics, which define the hotel

rank. The main issue with all these platforms regards

the secrecy of how the metrics are calculated. Thus,

the same hotel may have a different rank on each

platform (Mellinas 2019). The Tourpedia App does

not provide any ratings or rank about accommodation

because it analyses the hotel business from another

point of view. In detail, it provides every hotel with

its accommodation context, i.e., information about

the hotel surroundings (e.g., what tourists desire in the

local area where the accommodation is located). The

accommodation context is extracted from open data,

so there are no secrets in its definition. This

accommodation context is not shown to tourists but

only to accommodation owners.

Other works focus on the quality of services the

hotels provide (Su et al., 2007), such as room

cleanliness and politeness of the staff (Rhee et al.,

2015). This paper analyses the problem of providing

hoteliers with useful information from the point of

view of the accommodation context (i.e., statistics

about the accommodation surroundings). This aspect

could help hoteliers to understand which kind of

tourists choose the area where the accommodation is.

Thus hoteliers could improve or even add new

services to their hotels.

2.3 Applications for Tourists

Many applications have been implemented to help

tourists choose the right hotel for their trip. Apart

from famous Online Travel Agencies, such as

Tourpedia App: A Web Application for Tourists and Accommodation Owners

447

Booking.com and TripAdvisor, which have a very

complex business model, there are some less-known

academic initiatives. One example was proposed by

Al-Ghossein et al. (Al-Ghossein, 2018), who defined

a framework that combines hotel reservations with

events extracted from open data. The interesting

aspect of this framework regards the possibility to

select the point of view from which the search is

done: hotel-centric, which permits the travelers to

search for a hotel and then all the events in the

surroundings are shown; event-centric, which permits

the travelers to search for an event and then show all

the hotels in the surroundings. The Tourpedia App is

similar to Al-Ghossein’s application because it

provides two kinds of searches: hotel-centric and

attraction-centric. Another important initiative is

DataTourism, which implements a dashboard for

tourists to discover information about a hotel

(Soualah-Alila et al., 2016). Currently, in the

Tourpedia App, the dashboard is associated only with

accommodation owners. However, it could be

interesting to extend it to tourists. Voyageur is

another interesting search engine, giving tourists the

possibility to carry out experiential searches, such as

“quiet hotel and friendly staff” (Evensen et al. 2019).

3 THE TOURPEDIA

KNOWLEDGE BASE

Tourpedia App exploits data contained in Tourpedia,

a Web platform which exploits official open data

about tourism provided by government agencies,

such as Regions (e.g. Official Open Data released by

the Tuscany Region

) or cities (e.g. Official Open

Data released by the city of Matera

). The

methodology of this paper involves four aspects: 1)

enriching the Tourpedia knowledge base with tourist

attractions, 2) evaluating data quality already

contained in Tourpedia, 3) defining a strategy to

improve data quality through the concept of

accommodation context, and 4) multilingualism

management. At this stage of implementation, we will

not focus on scalability challenges, and we reserve to

future work this kind of analysis.

3.1 Current Version of Tourpedia

The main objective of Tourpedia consists of defining,

designing, and implementing new technologies,

which give a common structure to open data released

by government agencies. Open data about tourism are

http://dati.toscana.it/

often distributed through different websites and in

different formats or data structures. Tourpedia aims

to unify all these open data to provide a single website

to access open data regarding tourism. The system

architecture behind Tourpedia comprises different

modules, which enable a developer to add a new data

source easily and without compromising the already

imported sources. We described the general

architecture of Tourpedia in our previous paper (Lo

Duca et al. 2019). Tourpedia also provides a

mechanism to map the original schema defined by a

data source to the Tourpedia Data Model (TDM),

through a simple mapping language called Tourpedia

Mapping Language (TML). The TDM is very generic

and can be extended easily to add new features.

Currently, Tourpedia contains more than 70,000

accommodation facilities, collected by 21 of the

official open data websites provided by Italian,

French, and Spanish Regions (12 sources are from

Italy, 6 from France, and 3 from Spain). All the

available data is aggregated, updated continuously,

stored in a local database, released under a public

license, and can be accessed through a Web API.

3.2 Tourist Attractions

Tourist attractions, as defined by Harris and Howard,

are physical or cultural places that meet travelers'

specific needs and influence their choice of

destination (Harris 1996). These can be natural

(climate, culture, landscapes) or site-specific (theater

shows, museums). Medlik distinguishes between site

attractions (place itself is the draw) and event

attractions (festivals, performances), as well as

natural (volcano, forest) and artificial attractions

(museums) (Medlik 2003). While there is no

standardized classification, any element in a

destination can be an attraction if it drives visitors to

meet personal needs, even unconventional ones like

shopping centers. If it is almost impossible to achieve

a standard classification of tourist attractions, it is

instead possible to use criteria to establish the quality

of a tourist attraction. Varra (Varra 2012, p. 21)

speaks of three fundamental criteria, namely, the

replicability of the resource, which is the possibility

that it cannot be replicated elsewhere. The uniqueness

of the resource, that is, the ability to qualify the

territory differentiating it from others, and the

importance recognized by stakeholders in creating

value, that is, the contribution associated with it in the

global production of value. Considering the criteria

defined by Varra, Tourpedia was enriched with data

http://dati.comune.matera.it/

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relating to tourist attractions extracted from open data

owned by Italian regions and provinces. In particular,

the specific contribution of this paper to Tourpedia

consists of the following elements: a) addition to

Tourpedia of tourist attractions related to the Italian

regions and provinces; b) adaptation of the TDM to

tourist attractions; c) extension of TML to support the

following formats XSL, XML and KML. Since each

dataset was provided in a different format, a formal

mapping was defined from the original dataset to the

Tourpedia schema. In general, considering all the

datasets, 19 different types of information were

identified to be extracted and inserted as fields in

Tourpedia. The entire mapping is specified through

TML. The original version of TML has been extended

to allow the extraction of complex information, i.e.,

merging and splitting of two fields and simple

correction of error misspelling. Regarding merging, it

has been added the possibility to signal that a certain

type of information is found in two or more fields of

the dataset. Regarding splitting, TML has been

extended to allow a field to be split into two or more

fields during the extraction process. Regarding error

misspellings, such as unformed URLs, TML has been

extended to allow their correct insertion in the

database.

3.3 Data Quality Evaluation

One of the most important data-related issues

concerns their quality and availability (Pipino et al.

2002). Although a great amount of open data has been

collected, in many cases, they are not complete,

correct, or even missing. In addition, the distribution

of specific information is inhomogeneous: while

some accommodations/attractions present a

sufficient/abundant quantity of data, in other cases,

there are only some essential fields, such as the name,

the region, and a single contact. In some cases, even

this basic information is not available. In French and

Spanish accommodation, geographical coordinates

(latitude and longitude) are always available, while in

Italy, they are available only in 65.35% of

accommodation. In addition, there is a different

sensibility among countries regarding the information

provided, for example about rooms (completely

missing in Spain), number of beds (available only in

49% of Italian accommodation), elevation and chain

(available only for about 41% of French

accommodation). The described analysis

demonstrates how data extracted from Open Data are

not complete. This means that a strategy to improve

the quality of these data should be defined. A first

solution could be based on data enrichment from

other sources, such as Online Travel Agencies

(OTA). However, often, data regarding

accommodation available on the OTAs are

proprietary and cannot be reused for distribution.

Another solution, which is exploited in this paper,

could be to ask accommodation owners to provide

missing information about their activities. In this

case, accommodation owners should be incentivized

to release their information, for example, by obtaining

a reward. This paper defines a simple, rewarding

strategy: providing accommodation owners with

some statistics about their accommodation context.

A comparison among the number of accommodations

available on Tourpedia with those available on

Booking.com and Tripadvisor, divided by region

shows that Booking.com outperforms all the other

Websites with 201,174 accommodations, followed by

Tourpedia with 82,645 accommodations and then by

Tripadvisor with 54,485 accommodations.

Booking.com contains a sensible greater number of

accommodations than Tourpedia and Tripadvisor for

all the regions, but Marche and Comunidad Foral de

Navarra, where Tourpedia outperforms the other

websites.

3.4 Accommodation Context

Accommodation context concerns an analysis of the

area where every accommodation is located, with all

the tourism information, not directly depending on

accommodation. Accommodation context could

include tourist statistics, such as their interests in the

area or which category of accommodation tourists

select. Obviously, all accommodations located in the

same area share the same accommodation context,

while accommodations located in different areas have

different accommodation contexts. In this paper,

accommodation context is defined by tourism

statistics extracted from open data released by the

Italian Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (Istat). The use

of open data is justified by the original idea of

Tourpedia, which is only open-data-based. Extracted

statistics range from a national scope to specifically

covering the accommodation. At the moment,

statistics are updated to 2016. To update them

periodically, the architecture already defined in

Tourpedia could be exploited. This aspect and

integration with other open data sources will be the

object of future studies. Statistics are divided into two

categories: statistics on national tourism and specific

data on every accommodation. Statistics on national

tourism show different data at the national level: a)

number of travelers by type of holiday and age group;

b) type of accommodation chosen by travelers by type

Tourpedia App: A Web Application for Tourists and Accommodation Owners

449

of trip and by age; c) trend of internet bookings made

from 2014 to 2016; d) means of transport most used

by travelers. Specific data on every accommodation

contain the following statistics: a) the trend of

tourists' presence in accommodation at the national,

regional, and provincial level; b) the number of

tourists divided according to the type of trip; c) air

traffic as the number of departing and arriving flights

of the main airports in the region where the

accommodation is located if they exist.

3.5 Multilingualism

Tourpedia extracted data from open government

agencies of three different Countries: Italy, France,

and Spain, which provide information in their native

language (Italian, French, and Spanish). Tourpedia

App proposes a mechanism to deal with

multilingualism, exploiting the service provided by

Geonames, a geographical database that can be

downloaded and consulted offline. The proposed

mechanism is based on a Resolver, which translates

search queries made by users into Geonames IDs. In

practice, accommodations contained in Tourpedia

have been enriched with the Geonames ID of their

associated city. The Geonames ID permits a place

independent of the language related to the value

stored in the Tourpedia knowledge base. A specific

module, named Resolver, has been implemented. For

each accommodation, the Resolver takes the city and

country fields and searches them in the Geonames

database. Then, the Resolver takes the first response

of the Geonames database as a result and stores it in

Tourpedia as an additional field of accommodation.

If a query string does not give any result, the

Geonames field is set to zero. As a result, 76.8% of

records contained in Tourpedia were mapped to

Geonames records. Tourpedia App exploits the

Geonames ID to deal with search queries made in

different languages (Fig. 1) Currently, search queries

can be done only by place (i.e., the accommodation

city). In the Tourpedia App, users write the place and

the country names (parameters) in whatever language

they want (e.g., Parigi, the Italian name of Paris, and

France). Tourpedia App asks the Resolver to convert

the parameters to their associated Geonames ID

through the Geonames database. The obtained

Geonames ID is used to access the Tourpedia

knowledge base. As a result, Tourpedia returns to

Tourpedia the list of records having the specified

Geonames ID. Eventually, Tourpedia App gives the

list of records to the user.

Figure 1: The sequence diagram for managing

multilingualism in the Tourpedia App.

4 TOURPEDIA APP

Tourpedia App aims to fill in missing information

regarding accommodation contained in Tourpedia.

This objective is achieved through the

implementation of a dashboard for accommodation

owners, which gives them the possibility to verify the

correctness of information regarding their

accommodation and add missing ones.

Accommodation’ owner who wants to update data

contained in Tourpedia must sign a Tourpedia Data

Release Agreement (TDRA), which specifies the

terms of data publication. TDRA specifies the

following aspects: a) inserted data corresponding to

the reality, b) information added to Tourpedia by the

accommodation’ owner is released as open data

through a Creative Commons CC 1.0 license, c) data

can be withdrawn at any time. By signing the DRA,

the accommodation owner accepts to add their data to

the Tourpedia knowledge base and publish them as

open data. Standard users can also use the Tourpedia

App as a simple consultation tool to search for

accommodation and attractions. To incentivize

hoteliers to add their information to Tourpedia, the

Tourpedia App provides them with the following

benefits: a) it is completely free, and b) it contains

information regarding the accommodation context.

4.1 Users

Tourpedia App is envisaged for two types of users:

tourists and accommodation owners. Potentially,

tourists are interested in all data contained in

Tourpedia. Accommodation owners, instead, are

interested only in data related to their activity.

Tourists are the main beneficiaries of the Tourpedia

App because they exploit data contained in the Web

application to organize their trips, select the best

accommodation for their holidays, and so on. In

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450

detail, every tourist can search for accommodations

or tourist attractions located in a place and select their

preferred one based on its geographic position (Fig.

2) As a result, the Tourpedia App returns the list of

all accommodations and attractions matching the

search, and for each of them, it provides as much

information as possible. Once the tourist chooses the

best accommodation/attraction, they can contact it

through the given Website/social network or contact

it directly by telephone/email. A tourist could also be

interested in making comparisons, for example, on

the accommodation closest to places of interest or

attractions, or, vice versa, on the most interesting

attractions to visit near the structure where they

intend to stay. Currently, Tourpedia App does not

provide any mechanism to reserve a room in a hotel

because of the lack of financial resources to

implement this aspect.

A service provider is a juridical entity that provides

any kind of service to tourists. Different categories of

service providers can be imagined, such as

accommodation owners, museums, archives, etc.

Concerning tourists, service providers have different

needs related to the management and verification of

their data. Fig. 3 describes the flow diagram for service

providers. A service provider is mainly interested in

checking that the information about his/her service is

correct, clear, and comprehensive to attract tourists. In

addition, they should be interested in comparing

his/her service with those of other competing

structures. Tourpedia App provides him/her with an

external dashboard capable of allowing him/her to add,

modify, and improve data. Regarding accommodation,

the dashboard provides additional information related

to the accommodation context.

Figure 2: Flow diagram of Tourpedia App for tourists.

Figure 3: Flow diagram of Tourpedia App for service

providers.

4.2 Navigation

A user can search for a location by filling in the text

input. As output, the Tourpedia App shows on a

geographic map all the accommodations and

attractions located near that location. Accommodations

and attractions are represented through markers (beds

and amphitheaters, respectively). The nearest markers

are grouped into clusters to make viewing and brows-

ing easier and faster. On the left part of the screen, there

is a list of accommodations and attractions. The two

lists are maintained separately and can be displayed

only one at a time. However, it is possible to switch

from one to the other with a click at any time,

determining, among other things, a change of color

theme in the entire window. The lists are organized into

numbered pages, each containing a maximum of six

previews. These are boxes within which only the

essential information for each accommodation or

attraction is provided: name, address, category (only

for attractions), and an image, replaced by a Google

Street View snapshot in case it is not in the database.

Such an image is calculated using the latitude and

longitude of the accommodation/attraction.

If the user clicks on one of the elements of the lists

(or marker), all the information about that

accommodation/attraction is shown. Information is

organized in two sections: the first one describes the

name, the associated image, and the category (only

for attractions); the second one instead, contains

details (address, telephone number, fax, e-mail,

website). Only for accommodation, there is a further

link, which permits a user to claim to be the

accommodation owner. This link connects the Web

application to the Dashboard, described in the next

section. Accommodation also has a third section,

where additional information is listed and divided

into categories. After a brief description of the

accommodation, it is possible to find data relating to

the services offered within it, such as the presence of

Wi-Fi or private parking, the number of rooms, suites,

or beds available, and languages spoken by the staff.

The section also has a slideshow showing the main

attractions in its vicinity, navigable by two arrows or

by scrolling horizontally.

4.3 Dashboard

To mitigate the problem of missing information

contained in Tourpedia, the Tourpedia App

implements a dashboard for service providers to

allow them to contribute to the improvement and

enrichment of their data. Currently, the dashboard is

envisaged only for accommodation owners.

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451

However, the service could be easily enlarged to other

service providers. Since the goal of the Tourpedia

App is to have data as correct and complete as

possible, only service providers are allowed to

modify/add information. This means that, at the

moment, simple users cannot suggest changes or

additions to the data precisely because the Tourpedia

App currently has no resources to manage this aspect.

Since each accommodation owner should be

allowed to change only and exclusively the data relat-

ing to his/her accommodation, they are provided with

specific credentials (username and password), which

are randomly generated and sent by email through a

procedure described later in the paper. The dashboard

can be accessed directly from the details associated

with the accommodation on the left part of the map.

Once logged, the dashboard displays a page where

the user can enter or modify the data relating to their

accommodation. Such a page is divided into two

sections. In the first, the blue one, there are the fields

related to the basic data, i.e., name, category, address,

stars, telephone, email, country, region, province,

code postal, city, latitude, and longitude.The second

section is longer than the previous one and contains

all the additional information that an accommodation

owner may decide to insert, i.e., website, fax, possible

locations or parts of the city, social contacts, opening

period, number of beds, rooms and any suites.

The second part consists of four panels:

accommodation facilities, languages spoken by the

staff, a photo of the accommodation, and a description

box. Finally, the accommodation owner must sign a

TDRA. The accommodation owner can withdraw

information related to their activity simply by updating

their profile with empty information. Once the user

submits the form, some statistics about his/her

accommodation context are shown, as described in

Section 4.1. This is done to encourage accommodation

owners to add information about their accommodation

in Tourpedia. To advertise the dashboard, an automatic

mail-sending system has been set up, accompanied by

a random account generation algorithm. The system

takes incoming emails from the accommodation

structures contained in the database and automatically

builds an email for each of them, containing a unique

username and password to access the dashboard. At the

moment, emails have not been sent yet. Thus we defer

to future work on analyzing this aspect, although the

system is ready.

4.4 Evaluation

Many criteria exist to evaluate a Web site about

tourism (Law, 2010). They can be summarized in the

following six criteria: authority, coverage, currency,

objectivity, and accuracy (Dalhousie University).

Authority specifies that the person responsible for

a site (e.g., person, institution, organization) has the

qualifications and knowledge to do so. Since the

Tourpedia App exploits data deriving from other

sources, its authority regards data source authority.

Data are extracted from open data released by official

governments and institutions, the Tourpedia App can

be considered an authoritative source.

Purpose defines the objective of the Web site. In

the case of the Tourpedia App, the purpose is to help

tourists to search for accommodation in a given place.

The Google web interface helps tourists to understand

how the application works. Although the purpose is

very clear, the Tourpedia App has many limitations

because it is only a demonstrative prototype,

demonstrating that open data can be used to build

applications about tourism. This means that the

purpose of the Tourpedia App is not entirely achieved.

Coverage is difficult to measure because it defines

how a Web site covers a topic. From the point of view

of the Tourpedia App, coverage regards two aspects:

data coverage and application coverage. Data

coverage regards the number of accommodations

available in the Tourpedia App. This aspect depends

on data available in Tourpedia, limited to three

Countries: Italy, France, and Spain. Thus data

coverage is very limited. Application coverage can be

defined as the number of features the application

provides, such as the types of searches. In the

Tourpedia App, only searches about a place can be

done. Thus application coverage is limited.

Objectivity should define whether or not there are

some biases or errors. In the case of the Tourpedia

App, objectivity is directly connected to data

objectivity, and this aspect does not depend directly

on the application but on the data providers. Through

the dashboard, the Tourpedia App tries to mitigate

this problem. Accuracy defines how the Web site is

accurate, i.e., information is precise. Similarly to

objectivity, accuracy also depends on the accuracy

defined by data. Since data is derived from different

sources, there is a difference in data accuracy. Thus

there is some data very accurate and others with many

errors. Also, in this case, the Tourpedia App tries to

mitigate this problem through the dashboard.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper aimed at fulfilling four main objectives.

Firstly, it described the concept of tourist attraction

and how Tourpedia was enriched through tourist

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attractions extracted from open data provided by

official Italian municipalities. Secondly, it evaluated

the quality of data contained in Tourpedia. The

analysis demonstrated that extracted open data are

never complete. Thirdly, to add missing information

to Tourpedia, a strategy to boost accommodation

owners’ release of such information about their

activities was defined. This strategy was based on

implementing the Tourpedia App, a Web application

that provides accommodation owners with a

dashboard to consult the accommodation context

associated with their activity. The dashboard

encourages accommodation owners to update their

profile on the application. Finally, a strategy to

manage multilingualism was proposed based on

exploiting an external database (i.e., Geonames).

Tourpedia could pave the way towards an

alternative way of thinking, not based on the

proprietary market but on the sharing of common

knowledge. This could create a more shared system,

which is not only in the hands of a few people. We

know that the Tourpedia App is only a prototype,

which cannot compete with other systems exploiting

proprietary data. However, the implementation of this

application is to demonstrate that it is possible to

build Web applications based entirely on open data.

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