Exploring and visualizing differences in geographic and linguistic web coverage

Abstract

This article reports on a study performed to understand the geographic and linguistic coverage of web resources, focusing on the example of tourism-related themes in Switzerland. Search engine queries of web documents were used to gather counts for phrases in four different languages. The study focused on selected populated places and tourist attractions in Switzerland from three gazetteer datasets: topographic gazetteer data from the Swiss national mapping agency (SwissTopo); POI data from a commercial data provider (Tele Atlas) and user generated geographic content (geonames.org). The web counts illustrate the geographic extent and trends of web coverage of tourism for different languages. Results show that coverage for local languages, i.e. German, French and Italian, is more strongly related to the region of the spoken language. Correlation of the web counts to typical tourism indicators, e.g. population and number of hotel nights rented per year, are also computed and compared.