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 of “Big Data” and the possibility of using free web data extraction tools (web scrapers) to support the development of indicators for tourist attractions in Minas Gerais State (Brazil) registered on the world’s most famous travel-related website, “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 about 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 in creating performance indicators from data extraction that is already available on the web at a low cost, improving actions and ensuring an improvement in the use of public resources in tourism policies