Radiography of the Tourism Data Space in Spain

From the Office of Data, belonging to the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, and in collaboration with the Tourism Working Group of the Spanish Hub of Gais-X, the X-ray of the data space of the Spanish Tourism is made public. This action is part of the public-private collaboration model for the constitution of the sectoral data sharing spaces, promoted by the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence as part of a more general framework of programs for the digitalization of the Spanish society and economy, all articulated by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan in line with the European data strategy and the Digital Spain Agenda 2025.

The tourism industry is a powerful engine of the national economy and employment. However, it is affected by the high fragmentation and atomization of the sector, as well as by a very heterogeneous degree of digitalization. In addition, as a transversal industry, it is directly related to other sectors such as mobility, health, culture, historical heritage and the environment, among others. Therefore, data spaces are optimal tools to promote federated business networks that serve to break informational silos and provide transparency and resilience against risks associated with disruptions in sectoral value chains. In addition, these networks are dynamic and evolutionary, allowing us to capitalize on the progressive digital transformation of Spanish tourism organizations, reusing investments in information systems and potentially opening new lines of business.

Therefore, Spain seeks to lead the construction of the tourism data space in Europe, for which this deliverable represents a reference and a starting point. The document seeks to gather both the challenges and opportunities that the sector currently has, as well as the needs and added value that the creation of this data space will bring, and reflects the importance of moving from the current approach based on the tourist destination to one where the tourist is placed in the center.

Likewise, based on a case-based approach to use on common data platforms, the value of the use of open data sets (open data), as well as some incipient efforts around the sharing of information between private organizations. Within this B2B environment (Business-to-Business), it also addresses the governance of processes and participants to promote sovereign data sharing across different areas with relevance in the tourism sector. The challenges in the scalability of these models, their design principles and criteria (articulated around the data space paradigm) and the correspondence between these criteria and various existing technical architectures are analyzed.

At the same time, these architectures address different technical areas of relevance, such as sovereignty in the sharing and use of data sets, interoperability (both at the semantic level, and of systems and infrastructures), the necessary coordination between the actors for the creation of value, the security of the systems and a functional modularity with which to provide flexibility and technological agnosticism to the operational deployment. In the latter sense, a general methodology for the construction of data spaces has also been included, which serves as a roadmap for its implementation.

Data spaces

Data spaces should be understood as virtual federated sharing ecosystems, the result of the dynamic interconnection of the different participating agents, and which do not have a pre-established monolithic infrastructure, but are formed by the sum of all infrastructures that comply with a minimum set of rules that enable interoperability between them. The architectural models of the spaces are designed to ensure the confidence and security of the resources involved in it, facilitating scalability by design. This makes them, based on a critical mass that provides liquidity to the ecosystem, optimal vehicles for the development of the Data Economy, by enabling the legitimate location, access, exchange and reuse of public and private data sets, positioning the data as a non-rival resource, whose usefulness grows as its use is generalized, in a clear example of network effect. These ecosystems go beyond the bilateral exchange of information, constituting federations of autonomous systems from where to enhance the value of the data with security, confidence and sovereignty, and where all the actors involved can benefit from the added value of having data sets with which to enhance the national tourism sector.