The success story of DG GROW is one that is powered by data sharing. To facilitate this, the European Commission has identified a number of actions to improve access to data and create a common data sharing framework. This includes: improving the availability of online information on tourism offers, setting up a tourism data space, and introducing common data sharing principles and practices between stakeholders.
The European Commission is starting a journey to harmonise existing models and standards for tourism data in order to offer at EU-level semantic and technical interoperability layers together with data governance and incentives for stakeholders. To this end, a workshop was held on 30 March 2022, to discuss the specific topic of semantics for the tourism data space, and allowed experts on tourism data from all over Europe to explain the possibilities and limits of aggregating data on tourism use cases.
The workshop revealed the need to clarify the definitions and boundaries of key concepts from the tourism sector, and to support the data sharing of private and public actors at all levels. It also highlighted the importance of an increasing level of interoperability and the need to create guidelines and support on how to implement this model to guarantee the compliance of various actors at different levels. The figure below illustrates this need for semantics through concrete data terminology issues in tourism:
This framework will ensure that data is shared effectively and efficiently between stakeholders, supporting the tourism data market and ultimately allowing for better access to information and services for tourists.