The Spanish hub of Gais-X starts at FITUR with its first workshop on the Tourism Data Space
17/01/2022
Organized by the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence in the Segittur space, it will serve to have an X-ray of the tourism data space in Spain.
The Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence has organized in FITUR, in the space of Segittur, the first workshop of the Spanish hub of Gais-X focused on advancing the creation of the tourism data space. The workshop will be attended by the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, the Chief Data Officer of the Government of Spain, Alberto Palomo and the President of Segittur, Enrique Martínez Marín.
This first collaborative workshop will focus on the use of tourism data, one of the key sectors for Spain. The goal is to shape a vision for the tourism data space. To this end, the workshop will analyse the challenges and opportunities in tourism data governance, data sharing technologies and architectures in tourism and tractor use cases for the sector.
Spain is the only EU Member State that has developed a vision for the tourism data space. Therefore, this workshop strengthens the Spanish leadership as a reference for this data space at European level.
The Data Economy and Tourism
According to data from the European Data Market Study, in 2019, the Spanish data economy had a value of 29.7 billion euros and represented 2.5% of the Spanish GDP. It is estimated that by 2025, this value could increase to 54.4 billion euros and represent 4.1% of the national GDP, if the appropriate legal, political and funding environment is created.
In this context, the data are profiled as a lever of digital transformation of the tourism sector and can become part of its infrastructure towards its development. In fact, the 2020 European Tourism Convention highlighted the importance of the digital transformation of the tourism sector, with particular attention to data and innovation.
The Spanish hub of Gais-X
The Government of Spain is working intensively to create a favorable environment, through the various initiatives on data economy detailed in the aforementioned Spain Digital 2025 and are deployed in the ENational Artificial Intelligence Strategy, in the Plan for Connectivity and Digital Infrastructure and in Strategy for Boosting 5G Technology. All these priorities are part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan which takes the opportunity of the NextGenEU funds to boost it.
In this context, the Spanish Gais-X hub has been promoted, which seeks that sectoral industries of all sizes, with special attention for SMEs and microSMEs, create community around data, search for new solutions and promote innovation based on data and AI.
After the presentation of the National Hub of Gaia X and the Manifestation of Interest launched in the summer of 2021, a promoter group formed by 57 entities and accompanied by the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, have worked from September to December 2021 in the drafting of the statutes of the Spanish Association of Gaia X, whose headquarters will be established in Talavera de la Reina, Castilla La Mancha. It is planned to organize the first Constituent Assembly in that city before the summer of 2022.
The organization of the tourism data space workshop will give the starting signal to a series of workshops throughout these first six months of 2022 that will be followed by workshops for the mobility data space, agri-food, industry 4.0, health, etc.
What is Gais-X
GAIS-X is a European private sector initiative that aims to create an open, federated and sovereign data infrastructure, focused on business and built on the values of digital sovereignty and data availability. Its main objective is to accelerate the European response on data sharing and digital sovereignty.
The initiative achieves capillarity in the territory of the different member states through 15 national hubs of Gaia X, including that of Spain.