Results of the OPEN DATA-survey
At the beginning of July, we started a survey on the subject of open data. Now we would like to share the results with you. More than 200 people took the time to participate in our survey.
Question 1: Are you planning on making your touristic data available as OPEN DATA?
Generally, there is a high willingness to work with open data. It is, however, also noticeable that many have not yet dealt with the topic. This becomes obvious with the first question: roughly 55% want to provide their touristic data as open data, but also 36% have not yet dealt with the topic. Only 8% of all participants stated that they do not want to provide their touristic data as open data.
Question 2: What types of OPEN DATA would you want to make available?
The second question specifically asked for which data the willingness for open data exists. It became clear that especially tours (83%), POI (78%) and the activity road network (71.5%) would be provided as open data. But also descriptions of regions and locations (65%), events (64%), accommodations (60%) as well as current notifications (53.5%) are largely stated as possible open data. Stories lag a bit behind the other categories with just under 28%. Only less than 5% of all participants confirmed their lack of interest in providing open data.
This question also provided the opportunity to comment: There were many suggestions regarding further open data offers such as public local transport, special local accommodations, insider tips and status information (e.g. for huts: open or closed).
Question 3: What license would you prefer for your data?
For our third question, only 17% voted for a CC 0 license – hence, not stating author or source. Everyone else either wants a CC BY license to assure crediting (34.5%) or a CC BY SA license for crediting and disclosing under the same conditions (48%).
Question 4: What else would be important to you in regards to transferring your data?
The fourth question was specifically aimed to learn about what other concerns occupy the participants when passing on data. They particularly emphasized the importance of the correct crediting of a source (73%) as well as an exemption from liability (e.g. for copyright infringement; 70.5%). An obligation to update (55.5%) was also very important to many. It’s followed by the author’s name (46%), a complete and unaltered presentation of content (40.5%), a backlink (40%) and tracking pixels (37%). Not quite as many stated noindex (no indexing for search engines; 11.5%) as important.
Few participants took the opportunity to state other answers (7%) mentioning the importance of issues such as the use and design of open interface standards, extensive analysis possibilities or no commercial use of data.
Question 5: Do you want to offer your own download area for the data on your website?
Roughly 60% of all participants considered a download area for their own website, 40% ruled out such a download area. Some added that they did not know yet.
Question 6: Do you have any further comments?
One suggestion on the subject of open data was a free of charge option that enables the use of high-quality data without losing the overall view in different collections of data. Another remark referenced the availability of open data for the integration on websites and apps.
What’s the next step?
First of all, we would like to thank all the survey participants for their valuable input – the results will help us in jointly building an open digital data infrastructure for tourism. We now continue to deal with this topic internally and will keep you up to date on our corporate blog – to make open data in tourism even more transparent in many areas.
Learn more about this topic in our article “Open data in tourism”