Standards Development

Scope

This standard defines a semantics base that allows representing relevant information related to tourist destinations (tourist destination, tourist resources and services within the destination, travel experiences), ensuring -through its use- the interoperability of municipal, territorial and country tourist platforms with third-party developments.

This standard provides the tourist activity with semantic data structures that benefit the whole value chain, from content developers to destinations managers and final users (i.e. tourists) facilitating the access to the relevant information in an intuitive and agile way.

Purpose

Tourism destinations are taking up the challenge of digital transition, a necessary condition for the sustainability and competitiveness of this strategic sector. Thanks to technology, destinations have the ability to influence travelers’ behavior to improve their experience, enhance their satisfaction and increase tourist expenditure. And one of the key elements that helps to achieve this goal is providing relevant and customized information to the tourist, before, during and after his stay at the destination. The tourism activity is intensive both in the generation and in the use of data and information plays an important role in the decision-making process for the tourist, the destination manager and the business sector. With this constant information flows between machines and people, there is a need to standardize a common language in the tourism field so that both (human and machines) can understand each other.

Machines, with their high processing capacity, allow complex processes operations and can offer information in real time both to the destination and the tourist. For the destination, this means the ability to anticipate and manage different scenarios, for example to adjust public services to the actual volume of people. For the tourists, the machines act as an interface of the destination and an agile facilitator of information, aligned with the tourist’s preferences. Machines process information and lines of code with instructions. Semantics endows an object with machine-interpretable meaning, with additional information that can be understood by a computer, facilitating communication between humans and machines and between machines.

The machines need to acquire a sufficiently high level of comprehension to be able to interact with the tourist, who is connected through different channels (web, app, chatbot, etc.), delivering throughout the trip cycle, updated digital content in a flexible, adapted, precise and agile way. In short, the standard seeks to provide machines with the context they need for man/machine and machine/machine interaction to be as efficient as possible.

The standard focuses exclusively on how the tourist information should be structured and transmitted and does not intend to define how it should be generated, stored or processed. The implementation of this standard by the whole tourism ecosystem will allow sharing a common data structure that will facilitate interoperability amongst different platforms managed by different stakeholders.