Ontologies have been used in tourism research. One type
of research is to develop a globally adoptable standard for tourism information providers to uniformly represent their
information [25], [26]. An example is the Thesaurus on
Tourism and Leisure Activities dened by theWorld Tourism
Organization (WTO) [43]. This standard can help unify
tourism terminology to help effectively search for tourism
information. However, there is a lack of central authority to
enforce such a standard [6]. Instead, various localized tourism
ontologies are developed and these ontologies coexist over
the Internet [25]. For example, the Harmonise ontology [6]
and the ontology developed for SigTur/E-Destination [27] are
two such local tourism ontologies. These efforts primarily
focus on the development of a single ontology for the tourism
information providers.