In 2022, the digital transformation in German tourism will reach a new dimension. With the opening of the Knowledge Graph for free data retrieval, the largest digital infrastructure project of the German tourism industry becomes reality. The progress of the overall project is impressive evidence of the tourism industry’s strong shoulder to shoulder – especially in the Corona crisis years of 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the cross-company and cross-industry collection and semantic labeling of decentralized data inventories in a knowledge graph is considered an exemplary nationwide data infrastructure project in the German economy. In order to classify the significance of this milestone and to make the future challenges posed by an open data structure understandable, this article will provide a concise overview of the background, the genesis of the project, its drivers and the upcoming next steps.
