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Exploring and Visualizing Differences in Geographic and Linguistic Web Coverage
Author(s) -
Venkateswaran Ramya,
Weibel Robert,
Purves Ross S.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/tgis.12071
Subject(s) - tourism , geography , german , atlas (anatomy) , world wide web , population , computer science , information retrieval , cartography , sociology , demography , biology , paleontology , archaeology
This article reports on a study performed to understand the geographic and linguistic coverage of web resources, focusing on the example of tourism‐related themes in S witzerland. Search engine queries of web documents were used to gather counts for phrases in four different languages. The study focused on selected populated places and tourist attractions in S witzerland from three gazetteer datasets: topographic gazetteer data from the Swiss national mapping agency (SwissTopo); POI data from a commercial data provider (Tele Atlas) and user generated geographic content (geonames.org). The web counts illustrate the geographic extent and trends of web coverage of tourism for different languages. Results show that coverage for local languages, i.e. German, French and Italian, is more strongly related to the region of the spoken language. Correlation of the web counts to typical tourism indicators, e.g. population and number of hotel nights rented per year, are also computed and compared.