e-Tourism: An Informatics Perspective

More and more aspects of our life “move” to the Web. The Web and the Internet, as the underlying information infrastructure, cannot only be considered as a mirror of the “real” physical world; it is increasingly hard to distinguish between the physical and the virtual. The Web, however, is not only reflecting and “operating” this world, it is obviously also transforming it. Information technology (IT) acts both as an enabler and as driver of technical, economic, and societal developments. One can even speak of a coevolution of humans and machines. With recent achievements in areas such as computational models, Internet of things, or artificial intelligence, we see the power of informatics. Moreover, from an ontological point of view, informatics influences how we perceive the world, how we think about it. This chapter starts by highlighting the historic importance of technology to growth and development. In the following, it intertwines two lines of thought: as informatics forms the technical and methodological basis of e-tourism, it reviews the nature of informatics as a scientific discipline, its methodological roots, and its importance, both for applications and for science. This is then related to the e-tourism domain, its history, development, and possible future. But most importantly: while informatics offers many positive prospects and possibilities, its development raises at the same time serious issues with respect to society, economy, politics, or the individual. Thus, the chapter concludes with a reference to our responsibility as scientists and to the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism.