Tourism-type ontology framework for tourism-type classification, naming, and knowledge organization

Abstract

The names of tourism types formed by scholars and practitioners reflect the connotations of various tourism types from different aspects and carry a wealth of tourism knowledge. The documents containing the names and connotations of 232 tourism types were sorted from the Springer Encyclopedia of Tourism and 16 major international academic journals. These documents were analyzed using the coding method of grounded theory. A total of 155 naming elements, 22 subcategories, and six categories were extracted. These naming elements, subcategories, and categories constitute the tourism-type ontology, which is the first tourism-type classification framework. Furthermore, the construction of tourism-type ontology enriches the existing research on overall tourism knowledge. The tourism-type ontology can also be used as a preliminary framework for organizing overall tourism knowledge and a foundation for constructing a unified tourism-type naming rule.