The tourism knowledge islands

• Mario Pichler
• Lisa Steiner
• Herta Neiss

This work reports on hitherto experiences gained in an ongoing research effort aiming at the development of a tourism knowledge model. The overall research challenge, to which this work contributes, is about identifying relevant tourism knowledge artefacts and finding a suitable way to represent existing tourism knowledge in an integrative way. Currently, a strong fragmentation of tourism knowledge components can be observed, which is, among other reasons, caused by the breadth of stakeholders and disciplines involved in tourism. These experiences have been gained through a review of structural equation modelling studies, which has been performed for the identification of relevant tourism influence factors and their interdependencies. Consequently, the perspective of this research is on transforming these tourism knowledge islands into a tourism knowledge network. Such an integrated knowledge model will substantially support understanding and learning about mutual influences of components in the tourism domain and decision making of tourism professionals.