Inventory of transferable digital applications and solutions for the tourism ecosystem

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Tourism is one of the key industrial ecosystems, comprised of several economic sectors, promoting growth, employment and social cohesion. It faces specific challenges with supporting its many small actors (99% of the ecosystem actors are SMEs or microenterprises) to develop more sustainable, innovative and resilient practices and services, fully benefiting from digital opportunities. Supporting them to accelerate the digital transition requires effective sharing and exchange of transferable, practical and easily replicable digital and innovative practices.

In this context, European Commission’s DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SME (DG GROW) / Directorate G – Ecosystems II: Tourism and proximity has launched the project “INVENTORY OF TRANSFERABLE DIGITAL APPLICATIONS AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE TOURISM ECOSYSTEM” that aims to collect information about digital tools and practices used in EU countries that support the tourism sector. These tools and practices may be regarded as good practices, offering tangible benefits to users and service providers and are replicable to other regions or actors within the EU facing similar challenges.

Snap4city participated in the online survey to share four tools exploiting the platform to provide sustainable and innovative solutions for tourism:

Data are collected via an online survey and interviews and will feed an online inventory of digital tools and practices. The inventory aspires to raise awareness of available digital tools and practices, support the exchange between tourism-related organisations (public authorities, SMEs, academic institutions, research organisations, etc.), and overall facilitate the uptake of sustainable and resilient digital practices by tourism-related stakeholders.

Below the four tools/practices shared:

 

Environmental monitoring

The solution exploits the opensource platform Snap4city to monitor and predicts the environmental impact of pollution in cities due to citizens and tourism activities. The aim is to provide a tool to keep under control various aspects related to tourism and city management that are more related to environment sustainability, to generate useful insights and alerts to act promptly for facing these phenomena.

Snap4city allows to collect and analyze heterogenous data coming from several sources, based on KM4CITY ontology the platform can manage all data domains available in a smart city system.

Taking advantage of the information retrieved from, for example: traffic and RTZ sensors, wi-fi access, air quality sensors, parking, cultural attractions flows, social media, etc. the practice introduces innovative ways to support cities management with artificial intelligence analytic and virtual representations of several situations in real time. A web interface shows several dashboards such as the predictions of traffic flows and environmental parameters in cities as Florence, Livorno, Pisa, etc., performed for each hour in the next 48 hours, with a spatial resolution up to 4x4m also considering the 3D shapes of the building for the dispersion modelling. The parameters are showed in 3D city digital twin or in 2D maps with heatmaps also reflecting the European Air quality Index thresholds. Connecting mobile App for visualizing, sending and receiving information, the platform allows citizens and tourists to have direct benefit as in the routing app provided by Snap4city that allows to choose the route based on the less polluted ways.

Working to achieve objectives such as the SDGs the solution represents an effective decision support system for public authorities and municipalities, which will be able to keep tools update and collaborate with other stakeholders for further developments without getting stuck in vendor lock-in phenomena.

Website address of your tool/practice:

Key user groups of your tool /practice:

  • Tourists/visitors
  • Tourism destination management companies or organisations
  • Companies providing tourism or tourism-related services
  • Public authorities

Tool/service have to pay for its use?

Please specify the subscription plan of your tool:

Snap4city platform is provided open-source, every customization needed or data analytics and new tools and dashboard can be realized under a monthly/yearly subscription agreement or with a lump sum agreement if third users is not able to do it by their selves exploiting the platform.

How feasible do you think it is to replicate use of your tool /practice by other companies or organisations across the EU?

The feasibility of replication depends on the context (e.g. on the available data and on the IoT network). The setting of the platform presents no difficulties other than algorithms customization for the analytics, which require a moderated effort to reach levels such as the solutions already deployed.

Since Snap4city is opensource we recommend following the free online training course available at https://www.snap4city.org/577 and ask us anything to have further information and any help to start using the platform or new collaboration with us.

To have a more precise description of each scenario we suggest to visit https://www.snap4city.org/4

 

Tourism flows monitoring

The practice focuses on old towns and sites of particular archaeological and cultural interest, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites to better manage tourism flows and reduce the impact of tourism activities on cultural heritage. Improving decision-making processes run by public administration and tourism or heritage managing bodies.

Exploiting Snap4city platform several technologies has been deployed to collect and analyze data about tourists and people flows in cultural heritage sites, for HERIT-DATA project these tools are used in the cities of: Florence, Valencia, Pont du Gard, Mostar, Dubrovnik, Ancient Olympia.

Snap4city allows to connect the data streaming from IoT devices, mobile apps and other sources directly to the platform, indeed being able to communicate with different sources, it was possible to collect data relating to the flows of people both indoors and outdoors by exploiting and putting together different technologies such as: thermal cameras, IoT pax counter (sniffing wi-fi and Bluetooth), mobile apps, ticketing app data. This practice great innovation has been not only the integration of data coming from different technologies but also the development of customized artificial intelligence algorithms for the Thermal camera and predictions in order to perform people classification, understanding transport means (walk, bike, scooter etc), all totally GDPR compliant.

The processing of these data combined with those coming from the flows of people relating to the various tourist attractions allowed to estimate the most frequent origin destination matrices, and trajectories, using them with real time tourist mobile app to give advice and avoid or prevent crowding.

This solution aims to help public administration and tourism managing organizations, providing them several dashboards to monitor and prevent critical conditions and contributing to the smoothness of people flows inside touristic cities and areas, improving people security and services management.

Website address of your tool/practice:

Key user groups of your tool /practice:

  • Tourists/visitors
  • Tourism destination management companies or organisations
  • Companies providing tourism or tourism-related services
  • Public authorities
  • Companies mediating tourism or tourism-related services

Tool/service have to pay for its use?

Please specify the subscription plan of your tool:

Snap4city platform is provided open-source, every customization needed or data analytics and new tools and dashboard can be realized under a monthly/yearly subscription agreement or with a lump sum agreement if third users is not able to do it by their selves exploiting the platform.

How feasible do you think it is to replicate use of your tool/practice by other companies or organisations across the EU? 

The use of the solution is easy thanks to the intuitive dashboard system, for other companies the setting can be hard since the different technologies exploited and the strong innovation aspects. For us once IoT devices needed are deployed is feasible to replicate the solution in due time.

Since Snap4city is opensource we recommend following the free online training course available at https://www.snap4city.org/577 and ask us anything to have further information and any help to start using the platform or new collaboration with us.

To have a more precise description of each scenario we suggest visiting https://www.snap4city.org/4

 

Social media monitoring for tourism

The Social media monitoring and Twitter vigilance tool aims to help public authorities and cultural heritage sites management organizations, to take advantage from the huge social media information that tourists and users share, to understand the most relevant opinions and critical factors in touristic areas and attractions.

The tools are based on the Snap4city platform where a system of dashboards is provided to set the information gathering on the social media and to visualize the analysis results. Thanks to this solution is possible to have several feedbacks about cities services and entertainment quality, understanding people’s feelings/reputations about certain areas and whether crowding events or any malfunctions in service have occurred for example in museums, UNESCO areas, accommodations and gardens. Exploiting natural languages processing algorithms the sentiment analysis tool is able to provide clustering and insights about users feedbacks, the Twitter Vigilance tool performs analysis:

  • for tweets and retweets (T/RT) to characterize the event;
  • citations by others to understand what influencers are, pusher, emerging, etc.;
  • hashtags to understand which are the most used or emerging, or reply to those used;
  • keywords, verbs, and adjectives to understand which are the most widely used, emerging, or reply to those used;
  • positive/negative impact, known as sentiment analysis.

Integrating the social media analysis with other tools available on Snap4city is possible to enrich the collection of data and having greater decision support about tourism activities, thus having an automated method to collect information directly from users without the need to conduct specific surveys that risk annoying tourists.

Website address of your tool/practice:

Key user groups of your tool /practice:

  • Tourism destination management companies or organisations
  • Companies providing tourism or tourism-related services
  • Public authorities
  • Companies mediating tourism or tourism-related services

Tool/service have to pay for its use?

Please specify the subscription plan of your tool:

Snap4city platform is provided open-source, every customization needed or data analytics and new tools can be realized under a monthly/yearly subscription agreement or with a lump sum agreement.

How feasible do you think it is to replicate use of your tool /practice by other companies or organisations across the EU? 

The main difficulties are only related to parameters setting, once is setted the tools is easy to use.

We suggest to contact us to create synergies and collaboration, since this tool is a small analytic part of what Snap4city can do. We can give advices regarding how to better use this tool and how to exploit other platform features that generate advantages linked to it.

 

Tourism decision support system (Data analytics and KPIs)

Municipalities as Florence are critical infrastructure in which several millions of people are attracted every year, they have to manage not only ordinary cities issues, but also high touristic flows due to the presence of several cultural heritage attractions.

An effective monitoring system able to evaluate all the relevant domains in cities and tourist attractions/areas management can in fact be an excellent starting point for having a useful decision support system. Snap4city starts from these assumptions to provide not only a monitoring tool via dashboards but also early warning, planning, what-if analysis and predictions.

This practice is a flexible solution introducing innovative ways to support tourism activities management and taking advantage from the integration of data collection, aggregation, artificial intelligence analytic and virtual representations of several situations in real time.

Providing a complete system of KPIs the solution aims to using data coming from several sources to generate knowledge and improving visitors’ behavior and the quality of touristic services. From the ability to exploit data sources such as: outdoor and indoor people flows, public transports usage, traffic flows, environmental sensors, electric charging stations, social media, mobile apps etc. the solution has a whole and integrated view of the city and its tourist attractions, providing a full and effective decision support system for public authorities and heritage site managing entities and private companies. Furthermore, thanks to the ability to send and receive data from new or already in place mobile apps, the platform can be set to provide information and alerts in real time directly to the visitors to improve their experiences.

One of the most innovative aspects of the solution is that Snap4city provide also the 3D digital twin representations of cities and indoor/outdoor 3D building visualization, so is possible to show analytics and data sources directly on the maps as for example through heatmaps or POIs.

Website address of your tool/practice:

Key user groups of your tool /practice:

  • Tourism destination management companies or organisations
  • Companies providing tourism or tourism-related services
  • public authorities
  • Companies mediating tourism or tourism-related services

Tool/service have to pay for its use?

Please specify the subscription plan of your tool:

Snap4city platform is provided open-source, every customization needed or data analytics and new tools and dashboard can be realized under a monthly/yearly subscription agreement or with a lump sum agreement if third users is not able to do it by their selves exploiting the platform.

How feasible do you think it is to replicate use of your tool /practice by other companies ororganisations across the EU? 

For other companies can be hard to work with different technologies and taking full advantage of it, as in this practice, that also present strong innovation aspects. Using the dashboard systems is easy but the algorithms behind the parameters showed require efforts and skills to be developed.

Since Snap4city is opensource we recommend following the free online training course available at https://www.snap4city.org/577 and ask us anything to have further information and any help to start using the platform or new collaboration with us.

To have a more precise description of each scenario we suggest visiting https://www.snap4city.org/4