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When planning our vacations, we all look for the perfect destination that meets our expectations: beach, mountain, city... But once we have decided where to go, we still have to make many decisions: how am I going to organize my trip so that everything goes perfect? Luckily, we have hundreds of applications that make our lives much easier.
Nowadays you can use some apps to calculate the most suitable route to reach your destination or to decide where to fill up the car during the journey without damaging your pocket. You can also look for accommodation or restaurants with a good value for money, using your mobile. Or consult the cultural activities of the area, looking for activities aimed at the youngest members of the family. And, if you want to go to the beach, you can easily check the state of the sea, the wind or the temperature of the water without leaving the hotel.
All these applications, in addition to helping us organize our vacations in a simple way, have something in common: their functioning is based on open data from public administrations.
The fact that an increasing number of local administrations are opening their tourism data allows us to generate services that help to manage our trips in a more efficient way, integrating information that is sometimes difficult to find. As an example, Asturias or Aragón are promoting catalogues of specific datasets focused on this area.
Many of these applications have been designed by individuals and companies, reusing available open data, but others have been promoted by the public administrations. This is because tourism open data not only help visitors, but also have great advantages for municipalities.
Tourism is a fundamental economic activity for our country. During the first 5 months of 2018, Spain exceeded 28.6 million international tourists, representing an increase of 2% over the same period of the previous year. These tourists are a great source of economic income: just in May, the average expenditure per tourist was 1,009 euros, 1.8% more than in 2017. It is not surprising, therefore, that all city councils wants to promote their services and attract visitors.
Tourism applications based on open data can favor interaction between visitors and the local community, promoting local services and fostering economic growth. In addition, some applications even allow to collect information from users under their consent. The analysis of this anonymized information, combined with other data sets such as the total expenditure on trips of international tourists who participate in cultural activities or tourists housed by municipalities, allows knowing tourists behavior patterns and designing specific policies with the focus on innovation and intelligent management of tourist destinations.
Traditionally, the tourism sector has a great weight in Spain, but like all sectors, it has to keep renewing itself so as not to be left behind, integrating new elements that help improve the visitor's experience. Open data linked to the use of new technologies such as Big Data analysis and artificial intelligence are a good option - for example to make recommendations and customizations based on user behavior-. The ultimate goal is to provide a high quality global service that allows us to continue being leaders and receiving millions of visitors year after year.
Evento
On June 5th, the TourismKG 2018 will be held in Cáceres. It is the first international workshop that will address the application of knowledge graphs on the travel and tourism sector. This event is organized by Ontology Engineering Group, responsible for DBpedia of Spanish, the biggest semantic dataset in our language, together with TAIGER and ODI Madrid.
Knowledge graphs allow to link concepts through the integration of datasets. For this, it is necessary to represent knowledge using Semantic Web techniques, such as ontologies or vocabularies, to result in machine-readable data. Knowledge graphs are used by search engines such as Google or applications such as Siri, to improve the effectiveness of their response to users’ searches or questions.
While this technology has already been implemented in multiple domains, such as medical or e-commerce, its full potential has not yet been exploited in the field of tourism, a sector that represented 11.1% of the Spanish economy in 2016, according to OECD data.
To shed light on this topic, TourismKG 2018 will have researchers, experts and professionals who can share their knowledge. The idea is to have a debate on the challenges, opportunities and possible use cases of knowledge graphs in order to optimize this sector.
The agenda of the event has been developed in a collaborative manner, to create an inclusive event where attendees can express their concerns and solve their doubts. During the month of April, a “call for papers” was opened for all those who wished to share their work during the event. These papers should revolve around 4 possible topic of interest: "Open data, proprietary data, semantic web and tourism", "Ontologies and vocabularies for Travel and Tourism", " knowledge graphs generation and completion for Travel and Tourism", and "Techniques and applications of knowledge graphs for Travel and Torurism".
The TourismKG 2018 is a full-day workshop at the ICWE 2018 (18th International Conference on Web Engineering), that takes places at San Francisco complex in Cáceres. In its 18th edition, this event, focused on the field of design, creation, maintenance and usage of Web applications, will revolve around the theme "Enhancing the Web with Advanced Engineering".