Tourism research in a nutshell: “The Tourism Knowledge Map”

The Tourism Knowledge Map is part of a larger project that develops a web portal entitled The Tourism Knowledge Base. On this web site the users will be offered comprehensive information about the organizations in Austria providing tourism education, research, and consulting services. The Knowledge Map assists the users in finding and optimizing a set of keywords for launching an efficient search operation in tourism‐centred databases accessible on the internet. The underlying method is the Self‐Organizing Map, one of the most widely accepted techniques of unsupervised learning. Three real‐world examples illustrate how a Knowledge Map may be constructed from the frequencies of keywords and their co‐occurrence in the abstracts of tourism‐related research papers, articles, and reports.