Open Data by and for Tourism: Outdooractive’s Open Data Portal
As part of the information event “Outdooractive Inside”, we presented Outdooractive’s new Open Data Portal in the run-up to the Outdooractive Conference. For the company as well as its entire partner network, the portal is a further milestone in the digitization for tourism destinations. It is a joint project and everyone is free to contribute. In order to keep up with the future, we have to network. We must create uniform data structures for everyone in tourism. Today, it is not enough to keep your data on your server. Data is meant to be available to whoever needs it. What exactly this portal is, what possibilities it offers and what you can do to become part of the project, you can find out here.
What exactly is this portal?
The Open Data Portal is an independent (non-commercial) place of collection for open data in tourism provided by Outdooractive. It gives everyone involved in tourism the chance to make their already existing data accessible.
Click here to go to see the portal.
How do my data become open data?
The basic requirement for an open data infrastructure is the licensing of the data. Outdooractive partners can do this for any content directly via the DMS. This is basically about defining and protecting the content’s copyrights. Once the desired license has been selected, the released content automatically appears on the portal mentioned above and is available for everyone to download.
What are the advantages of this portal?
With the Open Data Portal, Outdooractive provides a technological infrastructure that is freely accessible to all participating players. Not every single destination needs to deal with where and how they want to provide their data. There is ONE central place, which of course offers users a considerable advantage as well: People do not have to waste endless hours searching on thousands of tourist websites. For the content of the destinations, this means that their content can be found more easily. The portal is therefore another (free) distribution channel for the circulation of data.
Founder & CEO Hartmut Wimmer explaining “The Clients Database”
What’s next?
The open data project is still in its development phase. In future, the portal should not only be accessible (via the DMS) for Outdooractive partners, but an uploading function for everyone. Moreover, the portal will be extended by further categories regarding tourism.
For Outdooractive data infrastructures have been a topic for several years. With our know-how we engage in many projects such as the “Think Tank Open Data in Tourism” by the University of Kempten, the “Bayern Cloud” or the “Roundtable Open Data” during our Tourism Camp. It is our objective to further develop this topic, to search for sector exchange and to make it accessible for customers.
More about Outdooractive and Open Data:
A complete success: Outdooractive Roundtable “Open Data in Tourism” at the Tourism Camp 2018
Guest entry by Dirk Rogl: Open Data by itself is not enough