Elias Kärle

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

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.

Complete Semantics to Empower Touristic Service Providers

The tourism industry has a significant impact on the world’s economy, contributes 10.2% of the world’s gross domestic product in 2016. It becomes a very competitive industry, where having a strong online presence is an essential aspect for business success. To achieve this goal, the proper usage of latest Web technologies, particularly schema.org annotations is crucial. In this paper, we present our effort to improve the online visibility of touristic service providers in the region of Tyrol, Austria, by creating and deploying a substantial amount of semantic annotations according to schema.org, a widely used vocabulary for structured data on the Web. We started our work from Tourismusverband (TVB) Mayrhofen-Hippach and all touristic service providers in the Mayrhofen-Hippach region and applied the same approach to other TVBs and regions, as well as other use cases. The rationale for doing this is straightforward. Having schema.org annotations enables search engines to understand the content better, and provide better results for end users, as well as enables various intelligent applications to utilize them. As a direct consequence, the region of Tyrol and its touristic service increase their online visibility and decrease the dependency on intermediaries, i.e. Online Travel Agency (OTA).

Extending the Schema.org Vocabulary for More Expressive Accommodation Annotations

Schema.org was founded in 2011 by the search engine companies, Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex. The purpose was to develop a vocabulary which is compact and easy to use, yet powerful and expressive, to describe “things” on the Web and to make them machine read- and understandable. For the tourism sector however, the vocabulary provided in the versions up to 3.0 was too shallow to make an expressive structured description of, for example, a hotel. So far schema.org/Hotel provides vocabulary for describing a hotel’s core data, like name, address and description, an email address, a phone number or offers. Detailed descriptions, like the number of beds in a room, the bed type or whether pets are allowed or not, are not possible. In this paper we present our work on an extension of schema.org towards better, more expressive annotations of accommodation data. We introduce 12 new types and 10 new properties and evaluate how this extension can be used on hotel Web sites to annotate content in a machine readable, expressive way.

Domain Specific Semantic Validation of Schema.org Annotations

Since its unveiling in 2011, schema.org has become the de facto standard for publishing semantically described structured data on the web, typically in the form of web page annotations. The increasing adoption of schema.org facilitates the growth of the web of data, as well as the development of automated agents that operate on this data. Schema.org is a large heterogeneous vocabulary that covers many domains. This is obviously not a bug, but a feature, since schema.org aims to describe almost everything on the web, and the web is huge. However, the heterogeneity of schema.org may cause a side effect, which is the challenge of picking the right classes and properties for an annotation in a certain domain, as well as keeping the annotation semantically consistent. In this work, we introduce our rule based approach and an implementation of it for validating schema.org annotations from two aspects: (a) the completeness of the annotations in terms of a specified domain, (b) the semantic consistency of the values based on pre-defined rules. We demonstrate our approach in the tourism domain.

Machine Readable Web APIs with Schema.org Action Annotations

Abstract The schema.org initiative led by the four major search engines curates a vocabulary for describing web content. The number of semantic annotations on the web are increasing, mostly due to the industrial incentives provided by those search engines. The annotations are not only consumed by search engines, but also by other automated agents like intelligent personal assistants (IPAs). However, only annotating data is not enough for automated agents to reach their full potential. Web APIs should also be annotated for automating service consumption, so the IPAs can complete tasks like booking a hotel room or buying a ticket for an event on the fly. Although there has been a vast amount of effort in the semantic web services field, the approaches did not gain too much adoption outside of academia, mainly due to lack of concrete incentives and steep learning curves. In this paper, we suggest a lightweight, bottom-up approach based on schema.org actions to annotate Web APIs. We analyse schema.org vocabulary in the scope of lightweight semantic web services literature and propose extensions where necessary. We demonstrate our work by annotating existing Web APIs of accommodation service providers. Additionally, we briefly demonstrate how these APIs can be used dynamically, for example, by a dialogue system.

Multi-platform mobile service creation: increasing brand touch-points for hotels

With the introduction of smart phones, the marketing possibilities for businesses changed fundamentally. New advertisement and publication mechanisms developed a totally new way of communicating with customers more often and in a much more personalized way. This paper describes a design approach for the development and implementation of a tool which can be used by the hotel business as well as by other end-user oriented businesses. It helps to keep close contact with customers by using a technology almost everyone uses nowadays -- the smart phone. To accomplish the above mentioned requirements we propose the design and implementation of a content management system (CMS) rendering mobile apps for different platforms: Android, iOS and in mobile website mode. After the roll out of the resulting product and a testing phase with two customers it is apparent that the utilization of mobile marketing mechanisms really increases the brand touch points by an average of 17% and has a high acceptance rate by customers of all ages, genders and social environments.