Abstract:

In this paper we study the representativeness of tourism data found in the open and collaborative platform OpenStreetMap (OSM) regarding the official statistics provided by the United National World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Particularly, we focus on three tourism industry indicators that measure the tourism capacity of a country. We design a procedure that allows us to extract the OSM objects concerning the tourism industries and then we analyze how consistently the OSM data supports the tourism records of UNWTO. Moreover, we assess which data source better predicts the value of the so-called Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Indicator published by the World Economic Forum. All in all, this work represents a first step towards the exploitation of open data as an alternative and reliable source for tourism analysis.