German Tourism Knowledge Graph

TL;DR

The paper tackles fragmentation in tourism data by presenting the German Tourism Knowledge Graph (GTKG), a large-scale, stakeholder-driven knowledge source that aggregates data from 16 German states and other sources. It details a three-stage building process—knowledge creation via ODTA-based schema extensions encoded as SHACL, knowledge enrichment with geo-linking, and knowledge deployment through a SPARQL API and GUI—resulting in a continually updated resource since May 2023. Key contributions include the ODTA-derived domain specifications, daily ABox instantiation with validation, and public access through multiple modalities, including wrapper URIs for non-dereferenceable IDs and downloadable RDF dumps. The work demonstrates practical impact for applications such as chatbots and tourism tools, backed by licensing (CC-BY-SA) and a focus on interoperability using standard semantic technologies like RDF(S), SPARQL, SHACL, and RML.

Abstract

Tourism is one of the most critical sectors of the global economy. Due to its heterogeneous and fragmented nature, it provides one of the most suitable use cases for knowledge graphs. In this poster, we introduce the German Tourism Knowledge Graph that integrates tourism-related data from 16 federal states of Germany and various other sources to provide a curated knowledge source for various applications. It is publicly available through GUIs and an API.