With the ETIHQ project concluding, we are delighted to announce the ETIHQ Decision Support System which allows visualising and analyzing statistical indicators from different data sources (TourMIS, WorldBank, Eurostat) and from different domains (tourism, economics, environment). The system’s visual dashboard, based on the webLyzard Web Intelligence platform, targets tourism practitioners who need to perform complex decision making processes, enabling them to explore linked data archives.

The ETIHQ project was highly visible during the 10^th TourMIS Users’ Workshop & International Seminar on Knowledge Sharing for Tourism Destinations. The Annual TourMIS workshop attracts tourism academics and practitioners that use tourism statistical indicators from all around Europe. The 2014 TourMIS workshop is the 10th in its series and co-organized by major European travel organizations such as the European Travel Commission (ETC), the United Nation World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), European Cities Marketing (ECM) and MODUL University Vienna. Taking advantage of this workshop, we organized a set of events:

On September 11th, during the discussion of future developments for TourMIS, Dr. Marta Sabou and Dr. Irem Arsal presented the major outputs of ETIHQ and their relevance for the further development of TourMIS. The talk was entitled: From Multi-Domain Statistical Data to Complex Decisions and Actions: A Linked Data based Approach.

On September 11th, the talk describing ETIHQ has been followed by a brainstorming and feedback session where participants to the talk were asked for their feedback both by using a short survey and through open discussion. The major conclusions of this feedback session will be made public soon.

On September 12the, Prof. Arno Scharl presented the capabilities of the webLyzard framework used by ETIHQ for decision support  in his talk entitled: A Big Data Approach to Knowledge Integration and Visualization for Tourism Destinations.

ETIHQ has been covered by several Austrian news outlets, including:

• “Smarte Daten für erfolgreiche Tourismus-Projekte”, 15.05.2014, COMPUTERWELT.AT
• “Smarte Daten für Tourismus”, 16.05.2014, MediaNet, pp:66
• “Datenanalyse hilt Touristikern, Fehlinvestitionen zu vermeiden”, 16.05.2014, Wirtschafts Blatt, pp:24
• “Big data für den Fremdenverkehr”, 17.05.2014, Die Presse, pp:68
• “Big Data statt Fehlinvestitionen: Smarte Daten für erfolgreiche Tourismus-Projekte”, 19.05.2014, PRPLUS.AT
• “Neue Daten für Investoren: EU Projekt ETIHQ”, 28.05.2014, A3GAST, pp:86
• “Entscheidungshilfe Im Tourismus”, 06.06.2014, COMPUTERWELT, pp:56

The ETIHQ website is launched on the 1st of December, as the first deliverable of the ETIHQ project.

Started on 1st of October 2013, ETIHQ will publish tourism statistics available in TourMIS, one of the major European sources of tourism statistics, as Linked Data.

The project will also build a visually-rich decision support system that will enable tourism managers to intuitively interact with the TourMIS data and statistical data drawn from other third-party sources (e.g., the World Bank).