Tourism networks and computer networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how the World Wide Web can be utilized to collect data for analyzing the structure and dynamics of tourism networks, which are vital socio-economic systems within the global economy.

Contribution

It proposes using web-based data collection methods to study complex tourism networks, addressing data scarcity issues in socio-economic network analysis.

Findings

Web data can effectively represent tourism networks.

Tourism networks exhibit complex structural properties.

Web-based sampling enables large-scale network analysis.

Abstract

The body of knowledge accumulated in recent years on the structure and the dynamics of complex networks has offered useful insights on the behaviour of many natural and artificial complex systems. The analysis of some of these, namely those formed by companies and institutions, however, has proved problematical mainly for the difficulties in collecting a reasonable amount of data. This contribution argues that the World Wide Web can provide an efficient and effective way to gather significant samples of networked socio-economic systems to be used for network analyses and simulations. The case discussed refers to a tourism destination, the fundamental subsystem of an industry which can be considered one of the most important in today's World economy.