Providing Interchangeable Open Data to Accelerate Development of Sustainable Regional Mobile Tourist Guides

Laurens De Vocht (@laurens_d_v)W. Van den Bosch, R. Buyle, B. Koninckx, R. Verborgh,

E. Mannens, and R. Van de Walle

Introduction

Community: Regional Support

Open Tourism: Vocabulary and Specification

Making it happen: Dissemination and Governance

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

Agenda

Introduction

Community: Regional Support

Open Tourism: Vocabulary and Specification

Making it happen: Dissemination and Governance

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

WHAT

IF…we could use the same services in different places around the world without the need for searching new service providers or building new apps...

WHAT

ISInformation often can't be reused without analizing the data or building expensive custom applications.

WHATCOULDBE?

Linking Open Data to connect these solitary pieces of information to other data sources on the web.

WHATSHOULDWE DO?

more Open Data and a common language for machine readable (interchangeable) tourism information.

Tourism organizations and application developers in the region of Flanders, Belgium set-up a shared vision on a data model, supported by the relevant stakeholders in the sector. Such a model is key for developing sustainable mobile tourist guides. ?

?

Current State

Approach for tourism data to be made available anywhere, anytime via mobile devices (apps).

Expensive: complex to model, transform tourism data over and over (e.g. for different regions)

inhibits many players, including governments, in developing such applications.

Mobile tourist guides in Flanders?

Work in progress

We developed a data model and specification for the data disclosure, to lower (cost-) barriers for reuse.

Applying open standards contributed to the achievement of a reusable and interoperable datahub for

such mobile tourism applications and services.

Working groups delivered a domain model and specification for tourism data:

Immediately (re-)usable for building mobile tourism applications.

Increased awareness and platform for discussion

What else is out there? How do others approach similar data?

Leads to semantic convergence which is forming a regional foundation for future developments

Mobile tourist guides in Flanders?

Shared vision?“Open Tourism” Model and

SpecificationOntologies are expected to enable

computers to process information “much more effectively in ways that are useful

and meaningful to the human user” (Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila 2001).

Introduction

Community Driven: The Regional User Group

Open Tourism: Vocabulary and Specification

Making it happen: Dissemination and Governance

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

User Group 40+ actors: SME’s, NPO’s involved in culture and tourism activities, representatives from

the provinces and of the major cities in Flanders

How the User Group handles their data

User priorities as:data provider and data consumer

Introduction

Community: Regional Support

Open Tourism: Vocabulary and Specification

Making it happen: Dissemination and Governance

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

Modelling the Data: Process Overview

Tourism Specification

Domains Entities + Relations + Attributes

Steering committee

Working groupsper domain

formalizationvalidation

Defining Tourism Domains

What?

By whom?

Where?

When?

How?

For whom?

Availability

Offering

Experience

Demand

“After defining the scope of each sub-

domain we organized working groups. Each group was responsible to work out their sub-

domain in detail in terms of domain

modeling”

Result: Conceptual Model and Specification

Availability

Offering

Experience

Demand

Open Tourism Data: Conceptual Model

Locations

Opening Hours

Touristic Products (Events, Lodging, Restaurants, Activities, Attractions…)

PricingRates

Organizations

Reports and Statistics

Target Groups

Meta-information

Publication Channels

Media (Text, Video, Images…)

Open Tourism Data: Conceptual Model

Open Tourism Data: Conceptual Model

Statistics, Reports, Target Groups and Organizations

Meta-information

Locations

Touristic Products

Opening Hours, Media and Channels

(Registered) OrganizationMetadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data

Terms/MetadataVocabulary

Core Location Vocabulary

Maximal Reuse of Existing Vocabularies

GoodRelations OntologyAccommodation Ontology

Creative Work TerminologyOpenigHours Specification

Note: Some crucial terms for relations and attributes were introduced in a dedicated namespace of open tourism data:ost - http://w3id.org/ost to ‘glue’ the vocabularies together

Introduction

Community: Regional Support

Open Tourism: Vocabulary and Specification

Making it happen: Dissemination and Governance

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

Understanding the ‘semantics’

“the language” (vocabulary) aspect

syntax & grammar covered by techies → see it as a dictionary

where is it described? What does it cover?

specification http://w3id.org/ost/spec

open world assumption → open to reality

lack of central authority → bi-directional & community managed

understand your own data!

& understand that understanding may not be trivial

Use & Uptake

possible to integrate data of any format

shift focus: from data format to data quality

link any data to any data nevertheless

speak, advocate, listen (semantics!)

be ready to update & upgrade tools

CSV

JSON

XML

XLS

...

JSON(LD)

(RDF)XML

HTML(+RDFa)

MAP

...

Publish source data any format on the Web

The DataTankhttp://thedatatank.com

Data published with the Open Tourism specification

The West Flanders tourism organization was

the first to bring their data in line with the specification

http://datahub.westtoer.be

The Open Tourism Community: Portal

Mailing list

Tools and resources

The Open Toursm Data

Vocabulary and Specification

News on the upcoming events

http://tourism.openknowledge.be

Introduction

Community: Regional Support

Open Tourism: Vocabulary and Specification

Making it happen: Dissemination and Governance

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

Next steps…

Pilot cases (e.g. interactive multimedia walking routes, map coastal and rural cycling networks) to prove the added value of the reduced effort in building mobile tourism guides and ensure that there is a significant impact on the tourism policy in the region of Flanders, Belgium.

Bring The Open Tourism specification to an international level.

Build a bridge to the interoperability programme of the Flemish Government, “Open Standards for Linked Governments”.

semantic collaboration more and more a cornerstone in next generation mobile tourism applications.

semantic standards are a katalysator for better interoperable tourism services and Open Tourism Data.

The Open Tourism model and specifcation at http://w3id.org/ost/spec

Lessons Learned

Providing Interchangeable Open Data to Accelerate Development of Sustainable Regional Mobile Tourist Guides

Laurens De Vochtlaurens.devocht@ugent.be

@laurens_d_vhttp://tourism.openknowledge.be