Towards the Semantic Web in e-Tourism: Lack of Semantics or Lack of Content?

The Semantic Web aims at making the wealth of information available on the Web accessible to more precise search and automated information extraction and processing, based on a machine-readable representation of meaning in the form of ontologies. One common assumption is that the Semantic Web can be made a reality by gradually augmenting existing Web data by ontological annotations. In this paper, we describe the results of a quantitative analysis of Web content about Austrian accommodations and show that the data necessary to make the vision of the Semantic Web a reality is widely not available on the current Web, not even in a human-readable form. We discuss possible causes and argue that Semantic Web services technology will mitigate the problem, since business entities are more likely to expose functionality than data in competitive markets