The project’s background is that the data bases of tourism organizations are not only of interest for the open data community, but also for citizens, research institutions, companies, and others. This open data project was therefore initiated as an identified regional project of far-reaching importance for the Ruhr metropolis, striving to develop a regional open data offering.
The major challenge in developing a stock of open data is that information is currently not available in one central location for the entire Ruhr metropolis. Furthermore, the data are not subject to a uniform standard and have a heterogeneous data structure.
Fraunhofer ISST is participating in the publicly funded project as the project engineer for Ruhr Tourismus GmbH, providing its expertise in the fields of data strategies, data architectures, project management, and more. We are constantly available in the project as a technical and organizational contact, providing support across work packages and organizations.
We also serve as the interface for the technical linking of data sources and platforms for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the federal government in keeping with the respective tourism strategy.
The open data portal of the Ruhr metropolis serves as a central point of contact, considerably reducing the effort for finding and sharing data. This is a major gain for all participants. The project objective is the exemplary development and optimization of tools for regional destination management within the Ruhr metropolis. A state-of-the-art implementation of the state tourism strategy is to be supported by the technical solutions. This boosts the visibility of tourism offers in the Ruhr metropolis. Offers can also be tailored to individual user groups through the better use of data.
Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering