Page - 52 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

TheEvolution of theWeb 3.0 With the developments described above, theWorldWideWeb is changing into a semantic Web or Web 3.0 (Kinlan 2016; Horster and Kärle 2019c). The future development, especially in tourism, is that travellerswill receive answers and rec- ommendations in real time, depending on the provider, interest and output device. To realise this,machines have tobe able to interpret data. For users, it is becoming increasingly irrelevantwhere the data comes fromandviawhich channel (Sommer 2018).Theclassicwebdesigntakesabackseat,andDMOshavetofocusonthedata architecture instead of on their websites (“semantify”, n.d.). Large players such as Google or Facebook are currently driving these developments. The Google KnowledgeGraph,which nowprovides answers to questionswithout listingweb- sites at the topof the resultsofaGoogle search,makes this all tooclear. Ifyouenter terms in theGooglesearchengine,youincreasinglygetanoverviewat the topof the search results page. Voice assistants are going in a similar direction, providing answers insteadof links. In thisway, largeplatformsbuild“walledgardens”, aweb on theweb that the user no longer has to leave to receive information. The advan- tages for the user or traveller are obvious, but the tourist actors and DMOs are increasingly invisible as senders ofmessages, unless they store their details in the designatedvirtual locationsandanappropriatedata format, forexample,GoogleMy Business. Destinations couldmake company data and further information such as events and informationonhiking trails available in the samewayon theentireweb, tobreakupthepowerof thewalledgardensandtocreateaweboradatabasis that is open to anyone. On the other hand, the use or labelling of data in formats like schema.orgalsohelps to increase thevisibilityofaDMOonlargeplatforms,as they and their information are displayedmore prominently (Hauer 2020). 1.1 HowDoTourismDestinations inGermanydealwithAI, DecentralisedData Structures andNewTypes of Interactions in theWeb3.0? Tourism is one of the most “affected” sectors when it comes to digitisation. It appears that the industry has lost control of the data. The big players Google and Facebook, or travel platforms such as TripAdvisor, are striving for information monopolies or already have them.Travellers are using these and other channels to obtain information about their trips and are not very interested in where the information comes from. This is also supported by the falling number of visitor clicks on the destination websites. The data flow is establishing itself as increas- inglymore important than thedatachannel (Sommer2018,p.4).Another challenge for tourism is the purely technical one: “There is a fragmented picture of different data formats with very varying levels of detail and often severely restricted pos- sibilities for data use. Harmonisation is difficult, but wouldmake it much easier” (Sommer 2018, p. 5). 54 N. Richter andD. Dragoeva