The latest forecasts for the Portuguese tourist industry show that it will represent 16% of the Portuguese GNP
very soon and, for 2017, the State Statistical Office registered over 3.5 million guests visiting the North of Portugal and
around 7.4 million overnight stays in the region’s tourist accommodation, which makes it safe to say that investing in
projects that foster a common language in business communication will not only result in tangible financial gains but also
in improved multi-cultural and multilingual understanding. Companies need, thus, to communicate seamlessly in a fully
internationalised and digital world challenges companies to meet the need to systematise and harmonise language to
properly convey meaning, thus promoting successful business undertakings. Such a need, a direct consequence of the
phenomenon of globalisation and internationalisation of scientific and technological knowledge, becomes clear in a region
with all the necessary elements to anchor sustainable growth, namely the four locations classified as UNESCO’s World
Heritage sites (Porto’s historic center, Alto Douro wine region, Côa Valley Archeological Park and Guimarães Historic
Center). “WiTo - Do you speak wine tourism?” is a project, supported by a PhD thesis, that aims at creating an electronic
multilingual thesaurus the wine tourism experts will consider a useful tool for communicating with different publics
(experts and non-experts). Thus, we will have to determine which subjects and technical know-how are considered core,
complementary and cross-sectional to wine tourism, leading to the conceptual representation of wine tourism specialised
language (which, in turn, will allow for structuring and harmonization of the linguistic heritage clearly visible in the area’s
terminology). This project aims at providing the necessary basis for optimising knowledge transfer (thus promoting a faster
flow of technical and scientific information) and its implementation in tourism information systems and electronic support
platforms. This article aims at giving an overview of the current research in this area and presenting WiTo by highlighting
some of its preliminary results and discussing some of the open questions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
