Cáceres hosts the first international workshop on knowledge graphs on tourism

On June 5th, the TourismKG 2018 will be held in Cáceres. It is the first international workshop that will address the application of knowledge graphs on the travel and tourism sector. This event is organized by Ontology Engineering Group, responsible for DBpedia of Spanish, the biggest semantic dataset in our language, together with TAIGER and ODI Madrid.

Knowledge graphs allow to link concepts through the integration of datasets. For this, it is necessary to represent knowledge using Semantic Web techniques, such as ontologies or vocabularies, to result in machine-readable data. Knowledge graphs are used by search engines such as Google or applications such as Siri, to improve the effectiveness of their response to users’ searches or questions.

While this technology has already been implemented in multiple domains, such as medical or e-commerce, its full potential has not yet been exploited in the field of tourism, a sector that represented 11.1% of the Spanish economy in 2016, according to OECD data.

To shed light on this topic, TourismKG 2018 will have researchers, experts and professionals who can share their knowledge. The idea is to have a debate on the challenges, opportunities and possible use cases of knowledge graphs in order to optimize this sector.

The agenda of the event has been developed in a collaborative manner, to create an inclusive event where attendees can express their concerns and solve their doubts. During the month of April, a “call for papers” was opened for all those who wished to share their work during the event. These papers should revolve around 4 possible topic of interest: "Open data, proprietary data, semantic web and tourism", "Ontologies and vocabularies for Travel and Tourism", " knowledge graphs generation and completion for Travel and Tourism", and "Techniques and applications of knowledge graphs for Travel and Torurism".

The TourismKG 2018 is a full-day workshop at the ICWE 2018 (18th International Conference on Web Engineering), that takes places at San Francisco complex in Cáceres. In its 18th edition, this event, focused on the field of design, creation, maintenance and usage of Web applications, will revolve around the theme "Enhancing the Web with Advanced Engineering".