Preparatory actions for the data space for tourism

Outcomes and deliverables

• Inventory of existing platforms sharing data relevant for tourism
• An analysis regarding gaps and overlaps of data, and identifying potential common building blocks with other data spaces created in the EU together with a priority list of data sets relevant for the tourism data space
• A sustainable data sharing governance as well as a blue print that interconnects existing local data ecosystems and enables public and private stakeholders to develop tourism related data-driven services, including AI-enabled data services, on the basis of many types of data.
• A detailed roadmap towards a sustainable data space for tourism, building on national initiatives and interconnecting with other data spaces
• A set of technical specifications for interoperability with the European Data Spaces Technical Framework and other sectorial data spaces.

Tourism is a major economic activity in the European Union with wide-ranging impact on economic growth, employment, and social development. It can be a powerful tool in fighting economic decline and unemployment. Nevertheless, the tourism sector, one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, needs support to face sectoral challenges exacerbated by the recent developments.

A tourism data space, through its connection to other sectoral data spaces (e.g. cultural heritage) will provide access to information to the ecosystem, with an impact on productivity, greening and sustainability, innovative business models and upskilling. It will give the possibility of align offer to tourists expectations, adapting service proposals to new tourists groups, predict a high influx of tourists, and thus plan resources more efficiently, and even creating new business opportunities

The preparatory action will establish a multi-stakeholder data governance, an inventory of existing data platforms for tourism and a blueprint for tourism-specific building blocks which could contribute to the long-term convergence of existing and new data-related initiatives in tourism by making use of the data space technical infrastructure. The preparatory actions will support the deployment of these data spaces for tourism, and propose sustainable business models and incentives schemes to motivate participants to share data.

The funding will enable the establishment of a data sharing governance mechanism, with a detailed roadmap on how the data space for tourism will connect local data ecosystems at EU level that could be interconnected with other data spaces. The project will grow organically, building on different EU and national initiatives and public data ecosystems, and strengthening EU the connection between existing and future repositories of data. The project will:

• Engage the community of stakeholders involving associations acting at EU/multi-country level representing relevant stakeholders, national entities involved in tourism and public administration and/or governmental bodies
• Develop a multi-stakeholder data sharing governance scheme, bringing together local data ecosystem stakeholders, to jointly identify the data infrastructures to federate in order to enable a data space for tourism at EU level.
• Elaborate a blueprint for the data space for tourism based on existing EU legislation and data policies, as well as on common principles agreed at sector or local levels. The blueprint should propose an appropriate conceptual architecture and when appropriate, refer to existing building blocks. Particularly relevant in this context are solutions such as eID (digital identity), eDelivery (secure data exchange), the Context Broker and the Big Data Test Infrastructure and others, already widely used by EU-wide cross-border systems, should be considered to facilitate interoperability among the actors. The blueprint should also comply with commonly agreed standards and principles and ensure interoperability. Particularly relevant in this context are the Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) Plus, work of SEMIC, the reference community for semantic interoperability, the INSPIRE and location interoperability data models, SAREF as well as the forthcoming interoperability framework for smart cities and communities (EIF4SCC).
• Bring an agreed set of priority datasets and data themes (In addition to the relevant High Value Datasets), including real-time data into conformity with the new blueprint standards and principles.

• The awarded consortium will work in liaison with the Data Spaces Support Centre (see 2.2.2.1) and the Alliance for Industrial Data, Cloud and Edge, to ensure alignment with the European Data Spaces Technical Framework with and the rest of the ecosystem in section 2.2.1 thereof, notably concerning common tools such as:

• a data space reference architecture, building blocks, common toolboxes and cloud services;
• common standards, including semantic standards and interoperability protocols, both domain-specific and crosscutting;
• data governance models, business models and strategies for running data spaces, with the aim to recommend possible common tools, building on existing data ecosystems.