A Study on Integrated Tourism Platform for supporting Smart Tourism

스마트관광을 위한 통합관광플랫폼에 관한 연구

Purpose - The existing ICT based services for tourism are limited to supporting to service only partial functions among overall tourism processes which consists of tourism planning process, tourism activities and tourism experience sharing. The ICT based service system that supports tourism services necessary in the overall tourism process is known not to be yet introduced in domestic tourism area. It is necessary to conceptualize and design schematically the ICT based tourism service system for supporting the overall tourism process. In this paper, we propose the concept and skeleton functions of the integrated tourism platform, which would support services that tourists and tourism suppliers might require in smart tourism environment. Research, design, data, and methodology – The concept and skeleton functions of the integrated tourism platform might be derived in a qualitative research method. We proposed a concept of tourism life cycle proposed first. We investigated and analyzed the service functions of the existing ICT based tourism service systems that support each step in the tourism life cycle so that the concept and skeleton functions of the integrated tourism platform were derived with results that experts in tourism and ICT areas discussed in brainstorming ways. Results - We proposed the concept of tourism life cycle needed to derive the functions of the integrated tourism platform. The tourism life cycle contains six phases, which consists of planning, research, booking, travel, reviews and inspiration phases. The tourism life cycle is to departmentalize overall tourism process. The integrated tourism platform consists of data platform and service platform. The data platform is a kind of large scale database with integrating various types of data. The various data would be collected by web crawlers or inputted manually by tourism providers. The Ontology and Mash-up technologies should be applied to integrate the various types of data effectively to make data with good quality. Conclusions - The integrated tourism platform could support the overall tourism process in tourism life cycle. It does not only provide personalized tourism information and products for tourists, but also, provide opportunities with deriving creative business items for venture business mans. The service platform would also ICT based service system to support Sharing economy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.