The German National Tourist Board (GNTB) coordinates open data project to strengthen the travel destination Germany.
The cross-border availability of high-quality tourist data is essential for Germany as a tourism destination to maintain and expand its position within international competition. Therefore, the German National Tourist Board (GNTB) is promoting the development of a tourism knowledge graph, and the swift implementation of the broadest possible content from the federal states and regions.
Petra Hedorfer, CEO of GNTB, explains: “The competition of destinations has reached digital platforms. We are dealing with a structural change that affects the entire tourism value chain and defines completely new requirements for the global marketing of the products. According to the current technological developments and usage scenarios, the touristic offers of the travel destination Germany have to be found worldwide at as many touch points as possible and successfully marketed. The GNTB has a strong network of relevant partners in the tourism industry in Germany, international presence, contacts to the global platforms and extensive expertise in the context of digital transformation. On this basis, and together with our partners, we are pushing forward with the Open Data / Knowledge Graph project.”
The GNTB’s initiative in the Open Data / Knowledge Graph project is based on the growing technological and commercial challenges of providing and using structured data. Significant competitors of the travel destination Germany in the European market have also launched initiatives to design data pools at the national level.
Through open dialogue across organizational and national boundaries, suppliers and DMOs can position themselves in the changing roles in the value chain caused by digital transformation.
In DACH KG, a joint working group of tourism organizations and research institutes from Germany, Austria, and South Tyrol, an initial inventory was carried out in 2018, and the need for a coordinated approach to the development of a knowledge graph was established. The initiative of the GNTB together with the federal state marketing organizations, cities, and regions specified further necessary steps within the federal structure of Germany. As a project objective, the partners defined a uniform data standard at the national level and a standardized structure of the data.
Currently, the GNTB has launched a tendering procedure for an audit to professionally analyze a detailed current status professionally. Data types, content types and technical systems will be examined and evaluated in terms of their usability in a graph database.
Based on this audit, the requirements for the introduction of an open data structure (Open Data) are to be created this year.
