EC3 Froeschl ETD

VisitEurope.com: 

VisitEurope.com Hofburg Wien – 21 March 2006 Karl A. Froeschl, EC3 with support of Christoph Tratter

Project Objectives: 

Project Objectives Create a unique access point to (incoming) European travellers Collect and present content from all over Europe within a coherent frame Introduce new, relevant services Extensibility/integration of different applications Promote the use of inter-operability tools and common standards Open source software

Project Background: 

Project Background Tourism as a driver for employment and growth in Europe Increasing relevance of ICT in tourism – “eTourism” Extending the (marketing) scope of the predecessor portal towards the whole world Embedding the project into the eEurope (IDA programme) initiative Stimulating Collaboration (ETC, NTOs)

Pre-project Activities: 

Pre-project Activities Council Resolution in May 2002 “to reflect to strengthen position of Europe as a destination by using ICT” – political will Tourism Advisory Committee (TAC) & EC/DG ENTR Tourism Unit Action Plan “Modern online public services” adopted by the EU Council as part of the eEurope Action plan, June 2002 Ministerial support re-confirmed and ETC commitments, May 2003 A tender of the program IDA – Interchange of Data between Administrations, June 2003

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The Project Constellation EU Commission (DG ENTR/Tourism Unit) ETC ETD Portal Consortium Contract Donating to Operational conditions (European Travel Commission, eventual addressee) (Tenderer)

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European Travel Commission (ETC) Non-profit umbrella organisation of European NTOs to market Europe Since 1949, HQ in Brussels ETC New Media Group representatives of IT and e-marketing departments of each member NTO knowledge exchange and e-marketing support with specific activities www.etc-corporate.org

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Project Consortium

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eCommerce Competence Center Consortium leader Application-oriented research and innovation center for digital business Public/private partnership, since 2000 Mediator between academic research and industrial application Cross-industry, experience in eTourism www.ec3.at

tiscover: 

Founded 1991 Leading tourism destination portal in countries like Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, UK, and South Africa Business partner of over 2000 national and regional tourist boards worldwide Destination management system for individual destination presentations www.tiscover.at tiscover

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Siemens PSE System and application integrator of the project Program and System Engineering (a company of the Siemens group) HQ in Vienna, near-shoring site in Bratislava (SK) serving the majority of the branches of Siemens and a selected number of external clients www.siemens.at

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ITC-irst/eCTRL Center for Scientific and Technolo-gical Research is a public research centre of the Autonomous Province of Trento (IT) eCommerce and Tourism Research Laboratory (eCTRL) is an ITC-irst division focused on IT applications to tourism Know-how and systems in eTourism www.itc.it

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liXto Software Solutions for automatically accessing, transforming, and syndicating data from the deep web Extraction and transformation services for mobile and web application providers Conversion of web pages (HTML) into structured data (XML) www.lixto.com

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Project Management Inkeri Starry (EC3) Overall project management Co-ordination, documentation, communication, PR Main contact point of the project Contact person to EC, Steering group, ETC, and 3rd Parties (e.g., system vendors, content providers etc.)

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Steering Group Set up by the Commission Chair: Jean-Francois Omnes/ Francesco Ianniello (final stage), EC/DG ENTR/Tourism Unit Supervision and guidance of the project Members: delegates nominated by the Member States

Project Team: 

Project Team EC3: Hannes Werthner, Inkeri Starry, Oliver Fodor, and team Siemens PSE: Josef Withalm, Ivan Smolak (Technical Project Manager), Stanislav Mores, and team tiscover: Peter Starzacher, Claudia Bär, Erwin Schaumlechner, and team ITC-irst: Francesco Ricci, Adriano Venturini, and team liXto: Marcus Herzog, Tymon Wiedemair, and team

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Project TimeLine Tender preparation, formation of consortium during Fall 2003 Project phase 1: Design, from March to November 2004 (8 months) Project phase 2: Implementation, from January to December 2005 (10 months) First (April 2005) and second (Nov. 2005) demonstration tests Formal acceptance test: Nov. 29, 2005

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Project Past, Present & Future Phase 1 Design Phase 2 Implementation Warranty Additional Languages December 2005 End March 21 Official launch 2 years March 2004 Start Later Migrations Hosting & Maintenance

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Portal services by category static / dynamic content

Portal services: a closer look: 

Portal services: a closer look

Portal services: full view: 

Portal services: full view © O. Fodor (EC3)

Portal information access: 

Portal information access Internet navigation ... quite insufficient for target users because of the wealth of information supplied: search tools are required simple/standard search (text-based) semantic search (relation-based) specialised search (depending on domain/application) Service integration into a unified interface

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Specialised Search I: Flight Connection Specify flight parameters Get forwarded to airline Choose flight from results Execute search (pull service/liXto)

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Flight Connection

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Flight Connection

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Specialised Search II: Event Finder NTOs select and prepare event data Data upload (push service/Harmonise) Specify event parameters Query syndicated database Choose from selected events

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Event Finder

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Event Finder

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Event Finder

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Specialised Search III: Travel Planner Composition of individual itineraries according to personal preferences User account for storing preferences and previous choices Case-based recommendation technology (choices of persons with similar preferences) Generation of recommendations using Trip@dvice (ICT-irst) application

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Travel Planner

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Travel Planner

Portal back office services: 

Portal back office services Content services subdivided according to roles and responsibilities: CMS sections, content types adaptable to different target markets (content selection, languages) Reporting services (Web statistics) Administrative services All services implemented as web applications

Portal architecture: 

Portal architecture VisitEurope Portal CMS Admini- stration WAF Framework Services Logic CMS Engine Search Engine Loosely Coupled Applications External websites DB Config. Files Data storage Application Logic Presentation Portlets Logic

Presentation: Portal: 

Presentation: Portal HTML pages built with Portlets HTML is rendered using XSLT on the XML returned by the Portlets Uniform presentation of different application results Easy extensibility to other devices

Presentation: CMS: 

Presentation: CMS Back-office for administering and entering content Every NTO has its own section Every object of interest has its own content type Based on Byline, formerly Red Hat CCM

Application Logic: 

Application Logic Web Application Framework Applications behind the various Portlets Taking requests and calculating results Integrating the various applications

Loosely coupled applications: 

Harmonise event data from NTOs Travel Planner recommendation tool liXto getting data for various services flight connection search KIM semantic search Loosely coupled applications

Harmonise: data flow: 

Harmonise: data flow Portal CMS (Database) NTO event database XML export Mapping Data Harmonise Feeder

Search Engines: 

Search Engines Lucene (Full-text Search) NTO websites KIM (Semantic Search) Flight Connection Search CMS DB Crawling & Indexing Forwarding request Collect responses Indexing Semantic Annotation Airline websites

Data Storage: 

Data Storage Open source database PostgreSQL Configuration files Hibernate for Object-to-Relational mapping Hot stand-by database server for reliability Backup and security DB

Collecting Content for the DB: 

Collecting Content for the DB ETC and NTOs enter content through the CMS Harmonise event data liXto weather, currency conversion data, cultural heritage information Manually Automatically

Software Packages: 

Software Packages

Prepared for the future: 

Prepared for the future Easily extensible by design additional languages additional target markets additional content types additional Portlets and portal applications Modular and thus adaptable layout Load-scalable architecture Low effort for enabling access through new end-user devices

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Start page

Slide45: 

Austria page

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Have a nice trip to Europe! Many thanks for your kind attention!