SWICICO - Social Media Analysis Based on Linked Data for New trends of Chinese Tourists in Switzerland

In recent years, Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social network service in China, has attracted attention from scholars in the domain of information systems, as the spread and influence of users' opinions are increasingly important. This study examined the tourist behaviors and consumer patterns of Chinese travelers in Switzerland by adopting a linked data approach for a large-scale semantic analysis. A total of 103,778 Weibo messages shared with Swiss locations were collected between January 2013 and April 2015. We addressed questions about Chinese travelers' profiles, trends in keywords, and differences between first time and multiple visitors. We also conducted a semantic search engine by employing linked data technologies to processed users’ interpretations in the form of unstructured text, which can help ensure that vocabularies of natural language expressions are mapped correctly to the existing ontology.