EXTRAÇÃO DE DADOS DO SITE TRIPADVISOR COMO SUPORTE NA ELABORAÇÃO DE INDICADORES DO TURISMO DE MINAS GERAIS: UMA INICIATIVA EM BIG DATA.

The research aims to study the phenomenon called “Big Data" and the possibility of using free web data extraction tools (web scrapers) to help the development of indicators about tourist attractions in Minas Gerais State (Brazil) registered in the world's most famous travel-related website known as “TripAdvisor". Therefore, we carried out a brief study of themes such as information sciences and the role of web-based information extraction tools. After the literature review, we used a web scraper tool called Import.io to collect data from TripAdvisor, searching for key information of Minas Gerais' tourist attractions and turning them into a structured database. Thus, it was possible to extract information such as the division of tourist attractions by categories from the state and municipalities, the number of evaluations, visitors' profiles, satisfaction levels, and the period of most visits at each of the attractions. We expect this methodology to assist the state authorities and municipalities to create performance indicators form data extraction that is already available on the web at low cost, improving actions and ensuring an improvement in the use of public resources in tourism policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]