Prior research regarding residents and tourists has focused on their commonalities and interactions occurring on-site. What is missing from the literature is an examination of residents as information sources to potential tourists. Online travel communities offer such a viable venue. This study has two main purposes. The first is to examine the influence residents may have on travel decisions and identify the types of travel decisions they influence. The second is to compare the influence residents have on travel decisions with other online community members (i.e., experienced travelers). Treemapper is used to identify the country forums, and thematic networks are used for the analysis of influence of eWOM. The results reveal that nearly one-third of the communication threads (including 1,699 postings from 713 contributing members) have been influential for members. Residents are more influential in accommodations and food and beverage recommendations, whereas experienced travelers are more influential in the destination information category.

Influence of online community member's postings on travel decisions were analyzed using thematic networks. Tremapper was used to discover which country postings to be analyzed and resulted in analysis of 8 countries. This study identified 8 organizing themes from an analysis of 81 communication threads that consisted of 713 members and 1691 postings. Out of the 81 threads included in the study, 23 showed a clear evidence of influence. The members' decisions were categorized by the information sources experience at destination such as residents and experienced travellers The analysis of the chosen countries and topics indicate that residents were more influential in food and beverage recommendations, safety concerns at the destination, and travel itinerary refinements (including things to do and places to see) whereas experienced travellers were more influential in accommodation recommendations, transportation, monetary issues like exchanging money and how much money to carry during the travel, destination information including tourist hassle at a specific destination, and itinerary advice.

The TourMISLOD dataset exposes as linked data a significant portion of the content of TourMIS, a key source of European tourism statistics data. TourMISLOD contains information about the Arrivals, Bednights and Capacity tourism indicators, recorded from 1985 onwards, about over 150 European cities and in connection to 19 major markets. Due to licensing issues, the usage of this dataset is currently limited to the TourMIS consortium. Nevertheless, a prototype application has already revealed the dataset's usefulness for decision support.

Decision makers in the tourism domain routinely need to combine and compare statistical indicators about tourism and other related areas (e.g., economic). While many organizations offer relevant data sets, their automatic access and reuse is hampered (i) by them being offered as data dumps in non-semantic encodings; (ii) by them assuming some implicit knowledge that is necessary to build applications (e.g., that a city is situated in a certain country) and (iii) by the use of incompatible ways to measure the same indicator without formally specifying the assumptions behind the measurement technique. We explore the use of linked data technologies to solve these issues by triplifying the content of TourMIS, a broadly used data source of European tourism statistics and by building a prototype system using this data.

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