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Dirk Rogl, a renowned tourism digitalization specialist, talks about open data.
He revealed an interesting contradiction.
The open data technology itself is intended to make all information accessible to end users.
However, users do not delve into papers, they simply type in the search engine what they want to find out. At the same time, an advantage in search results is always given to the unique, original and readable content, but not to a well structured and systematized.
In other words, if you look at the open data as some kind of tables or catalogs – this content is far from being demanded by ordinary tourists, and therefore it will not be displayed high in the search results.
Moreover, the artificial intelligence systems used by the search giants are so good that they are able to perform global searches with the given parameters. For example, no open data system contains a response to a tourist’s request for a “quiet hotel in Barcelona away from discos”, while artificial intelligence could process such a request quite well, and give a tourist some relevant result. As you can see, the DMOs or hotels do not lead in such requests, but the Internet giant TripAdvisor:
Therefore, perhaps there is no place for open data in smart tourism of the future, since AI will make the search for tourists so fast and relevant that searching in open data stores will simply lose its meaning, if it has not already lost.