Ημερομηνία/Ώρα
Date(s) - 30/03/2022
11:00 - 13:00

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We would like to invite you to a workshop dedicated to the specific topic of semantics for the Tourism data space on the 30th of March. 

Registration link: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/TourismWorkshop2022

 

DG GROW has launched a Transition pathway for tourism, whose focus is to support the green and digital transition of the tourism ecosystem. Among the actions and objectives for the digital component, data sharing is key.

To facilitate it, a number of actions have been identified:

• Improving access to data to produce official statistics (Topic 3)
• Common data sharing principles and practices between stakeholders under a Code of Conduct (Topic 9)
• Increasing use of data sharing in providing personalised tourism services and destination management, including creation of new platforms by SMEs (Topic 9)
• Improving the availability of online information on tourism offer (Topic 10)
• Technical implementation to set up a tourism data space (Topic 14)

All Member States (MS) today are involved at various levels in the digitisation of tourism data. Whether it concerns aggregated statistics, boosting search engine ranking, or improving the user experience or developing attractive applications, public administrations and various organisations are involved in creating and exchanging data. With the European strategy for data and the ongoing legislative European Data Governance Act, the European Commission described a vision to create European data spaces across various sectors. This is based on interoperability. In order to catalyse it within and across sectors, semantics play a key role because it facilitates the sharing and reuse of data.

Supporting data sharing for tourism in a common data space for tourism requires tackling several key elements:

1. Semantic interoperability of the data – a commonly agreed vocabulary for describing tourism data, relevant semantic conversion rules
2. Technical interoperability of data sharing mechanisms – agreed metadata formats, technical specifications of APIs, access rights, technical infrastructures
3. Governance of the data – agreements on data ownership, responsibilities, organisation of data storage for different types of data, legal responsibilities (data privacy, creating registries)
4. Incentives to get stakeholders engaged in data sharing, motivating examples and practices to combine data modules from different providers (open, paid data), incentives to avoid lock-in effect of databases creation and processing

In this workshop, we want to focus on a key enabler #1 for data sharing –  a consensus on what common data models and vocabularies are needed to achieve minimal interoperability.

We will give the floor to experts on tourism data from public services, who will explain their approach to a common vocabulary and showcase improved services they have been able to implement with it. Administrations and agencies on a national, regional and local level, who aggregate and build services around tourism data, and are all faced with the challenges and opportunities in regard to semantics, may find clarity and inspiration from this exchange. For example, all can find it challenging that the “capacity” of accommodation is sometimes expressed by how many individuals a hotel can host, but also based on how many beds are offered. There is an agreed definition of capacity of tourism establishments agreed by the European regulation on Tourism statistics, but the official statistics and the definitions used on the practical level are not always aligned. This concrete example, especially since the COVID pandemic, highlights the need to clarify the definitions and boundaries of key concepts from the tourism sector and support the data sharing of private and public actors at all levels, in order to provide new and more efficient processes for public and private use.

Of course, initiatives such as Schema.org and W3C have already developed common semantics to express concepts and realities from the tourism sector. Regarding statistics (such as capacity), national statistics institutes and Eurostat have agreed definitions, which however are not necessarily considered by other tourism stakeholders. A discussion with stakeholders from EU MS, therefore, is needed to see whether these initiatives are sufficiently well aligned, and if they take into account multilingualism and EU values.

Based on concrete “data stories” from across Member States, this workshop aims to identify both opportunities and risks of semantics by giving the floor to practitioners. Based on the discussion, GROW can identify priorities for the upcoming preparatory work on the tourism data space.

Click here for more info.

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