To Graph or Not to Graph: The Missing Pieces for Knowledge Graphs in Sustainable Tourism

Sustainability is a critical challenge in modern tourism, exacerbated by climate change and globalization. Thanks to digitization, data-driven approaches constitute a key technology for addressing related issues, such as overtourism. However, the overarching complexity of the touristic data landscape, amplified by the interplay of diverse digital platform ecosystems, poses considerable challenges to both data owners and consumers. To mitigate such issues, knowledge graphs (KGs) have received significant attention. KGs focus on data quality by employing unified data models and continuous data refinements, making them well-suited for data-driven applications. Although promising, many challenges must be addressed to make KGs useful in practice. This paper overviews the state of the art of the field and identifies avenues for future research, explicitly focusing on touristic value and sustainability. Following our results, future research should focus on different areas, notably real-time knowledge graph population, distributed and parallelized processes, and ontologies for dynamic data types.