Explorative data analysis and knowledge modeling methods for marketing decision support applied in the tourist sector

Abstract

The aim of this work is to support marketers in making informed decisions, such as the selection of target market segments, product positioning or optimal configuration of campaigns by extracting and managing knowledge from survey data. The proposed methods include the application of multivariate non-parametric factor analysis to reveal patterns underlying in survey data and their use as input to a knowledge engineering process, in order to build a knowledge-based system for marketing decision support in the tourist domain. To this end, an information technology framework is under development to extract from data and manage structured knowledge, thus making the results sharable, maintainable and available for problem solving to users who are not experts in analysis. In order to illustrate the methods, an analysis process has been performed on pilot survey data and a preliminary ontology-based knowledge model has been developed, that provides the necessary vocabulary to express the findings on tourist marketing. The results showed that the proposed methods are able to extract useful and reusable knowledge, applicable to marketing decision support in the tourist domain. Future work is planned towards the full development of a specialized Tourist Decision Support System.