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 [email protected]
@laurens_d_vhttp://tourism.openknowledge.be
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