Smart ETL and LLM-based contents classification: the European Smart Tourism Tools Observatory experience

Purpose: Our research project focuses on improving the content update of the online European Smart Tourism Tools (STTs) Observatory by incorporating and categorizing STTs. The categorization is based on their taxonomy, and it facilitates the end user's search process. The use of a Smart ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process, where Smart indicates the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is central to this endeavor. Methods: The contents describing STTs are derived from PDF catalogs, where PDF-scraping techniques extract QR codes, images, links, and text information. Duplicate STTs between the catalogs are removed, and the remaining ones are classified based on their text information using Large Language Models (LLMs). Finally, the data is transformed to comply with the Dublin Core metadata structure (the observatory's metadata structure), chosen for its wide acceptance and flexibility. Results: The Smart ETL process to import STTs to the observatory combines PDF-scraping techniques with LLMs for text content-based classification. Our preliminary results have demonstrated the potential of LLMs for text content-based classification. Conclusion: The proposed approach's feasibility is a step towards efficient content-based classification, not only in Smart Tourism but also adaptable to other fields. Future work will mainly focus on refining this classification process.