Analysis of Schema.org Usage in the Tourism Domain
This study assesses how well the tourism sector is prepared for automated web agents, but it is incremental as it extends existing analysis of Schema.org usage to a specific domain and time period.
The paper analyzed the usage of Schema.org in the tourism domain from 2013 to 2016, finding that adoption of its types and properties grew over the years, with the US dominating annotations but showing a drastic drop in proportion by 2016, and poorly rated businesses were more common in 2016 results.
Schema.org is an initiative founded in 2011 by the four-big search engine Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex. The goal of the initiative is to publish and maintain the schema.org vocabulary, in order to facilitate the publication of structured data on the web which can enable the implementation of automated agents like intelligent personal assistants and chatbots. In this paper, the usage of schema.org in tourism domain between years 2013 and 2016 is analysed. The analysis shows the adoption of schema.org, which indicates how well the tourism sector is prepared for the web that targets automated agents. The results have shown that the adoption of schema.org type and properties is grown over the years. While the US is dominating the annotation numbers, a drastic drop is observed for the proportion of the US in 2016. Poorly rated businesses are encountered more in 2016 results in comparison to previous years.