Publishing Tourism Statistics as Linked Data a Case Study of Sri Lanka

Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Freddy Priyatna, Mariano Rico

Abstract: Tourism is a crucial component of Sri Lanka’s economy. Intelligent business decisions by means of thorough analysis of relevant data can help the Sri Lankan tourism industry to be competitive. To this end, Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority makes tourism statistics publicly available. However, they are published as PDF files limiting their reuse. In this paper, we present how to transform such data into 5-star Linked Open Data by extracting the statistics as structured data; modelling them using the W3C RDF Data Cube vocabulary and transforming them to RDF using W3C R2RML mappings. Furthermore, we demonstrate the benefits of such transformation using two real-world use cases.