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International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 214-221 (2014)
A STUDY OF OPEN DATA FOR TOURISM SERVICE
Chien-Te Wu1*, Shun-Chung Liu2, Chao-Fang Chu3, Yen-Ping Chu2 and Shyr-Shen Yu1
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
National Chung Hsing University
Taichung (402), Taiwan
2
Department of Computer Science
Tunghai University
Taichung (407), Taiwan
3
Taiwan Cloud Service Association
Taichung (408), Taiwan
ABSTRACT
The development of open data has been unprecedentedly active worldwide in recent years.
The Taiwanese government also launched its official Open Data website in 2013, where
various types of datasets were included. The spirit of open data – free accessibility for all –
has since produced a wealth of useful applications. Proposed in the present study is a
mobile tourism application based on the open data provided by the municipal governments
of Taichung City, Changhua and Nantou County. This application consists of a graphic
module of travel-related open data and a serious game module designed to promote local
businesses through the online-to-offline strategy. The graphic module integrates
information from traffic, accommodations to tourist attractions to save tourists the trouble
of multiple switching and downloads during traveling; and the serious game module
interacts with tourists through location service and rewards them with points, which can be
redeemed as coupons to use at local retail stores. This study presents a novel way of using
open data in tourism and travel-related service and that travel experience can be markedly
improved by combining open data with serious game, which can effectively bridge the gap
between online and offline marketing by the local businesses.
Keywords: Open Data, Serious Game, Online to Offline
1. INTRODUCTION
1
The amount of open data has increased
noticeably in the recent years. Organizations and the
society have enjoyed the benefits brought by open
data policies. The open data platform of the
Taiwanese government [13] was launched in 2013
and offered enterprises and application developers to
create applications free of charge.
As people focus more on the quality of tourism
experience, the demand for tourism open data
becomes also more. A growing number of
tourism-related open data is now available on the
platform in XML, CSV, or JSON format. Since
mobile applications (Apps) have made immediately
available the information of scenic spots,
accommodations in the vicinity or virtually
everything during traveling, many useful traveling
Apps have been designed based on the open data
released by the government. For example, Taichung
*
Corresponding author: [email protected]
Bus App allows users to query for bus routes and
arrivals; and the Taiwan Railways and High Speed
Rail schedule Apps have been downloaded for
millions of times. These Apps only provide traffic
information and are truly popular and successful.
However, in actual tourism, the tourists need
information of weather, places to shop and nearby
public facilities, for which they have to download
multiple Apps and constantly switch between them.
Although open data is useful for tourists, little has yet
been discussed about how to provide better touring
experience through the integration of open data and
digital content.
Owing to the officiality and relative authority
of open data, App developers can now spend less
effort collecting data and focus more on creating a
better application. The aim of this study is to provide
a user interface to access travel-related open data,
including weather, location of a hospital or restaurant,
public transit schedule and the address of a hotel in
Taichung, Changhua, and Nantou counties, making it
much easier for users to access travel-related
C.T. Wu et al.: A Study of Open Data for Tourism Service
information. What is also emphasized in this study is
the interactivity of open data. Gamification (serious
game) and location service are applied to evoke user
interest. The tourists can receive points once they
check in at the spot; the more points they receive, the
more coupons they can exchange for, hence bringing
more potential customers from online to offline
(O2O). The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows: In section 2, related work of open data,
serious game and O2O marketing; section 3,
application architecture and the open data selected in
the research; and in the last section, conclusion is
presented with suggestions for future research.
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Agency, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and
Directorate General of Highways, Ministry of
Transportation and Communication. As shown in
Figure, any occurrence of typhoon, mudslide or
torrential rain, the damage areas will be shown on the
Map for people to avoid passing through and as a
reminder for them to stay sheltered. This application
has helped save lives.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
The development of open data, the application
of serious game, and O2O marketing are discussed in
the section.
2.1 Open Data
Open data is defined by W3C eGov Interest
Group [3] as data which are machine-readable and
capable of being engineered [8]. Compared with
closed data, open data is accessible to the public and
can benefit all and produce knowledge because of its
large scale [15]. With the increasing demand for open
data, open datasets are usually collected on an open
data platform before useful applications are created.
2.1.1 Open Data Platform
Transparency of the government and citizen
participation in public affairs are a global trend. Open
data improves the information flow between citizens
and governmental departments.
The advancement of cloud computing and
mobile service has drawn substantial attention toward
open data applications. The open data platform of
data.gov.tw, for example, stores data concerning
many aspects of livelihood such as food safety,
traffic, climate, etc. Application programming
interface (API) is also provided on the website to help
developers access its web service. This openness will
strengthen democracy and promote efficiency and
effectiveness in governments [14] and has already
produced new opportunities as well as challenges in
all fields.
2.1.2 Open Data Application
Open data is selected and released by the
government, without restrictions imposed by
copyright or patent right. This organized data is full
of commercial potential and values for all residents in
the country. For example, the Crisis Map [4] launched
by Google Inc. integrates multiple climate open data
to visualize natural disasters. Crisis Map of Taiwan
gathered open data from Central Weather Bureau,
Soil and Water Conservation Bureau, Water Resource
Figure 1: The typhoon track on the Google Crisis
Map [4]
2.2 Serious Game
In 1980, the US Department of Defense
entrusted Atari, Inc. to tailor its popular gaming
product, Battlezone Tank to the US Army for training
armored troops. After the Serious Games Initiative at
the Woodrow Wilson Center for International
Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 2002 and Serious
Games Summit in 2004 and 2005 [7], this term
started to attract attention from researchers.
2.2.1 The Definition of Serious Game
In Game Developers Conference 2004, serious
game was defined as a game for acquiring skills,
training, and simulation. Mile Zyda considered
serious game to be "a mental contest, played with a
computer in accordance with specific rules that uses
entertainment to further government or corporate
training, education, health, public policy, and
strategic communication objectives." [20] Wang et al.
[17] regarded serious game as a product between
video games and simulation programs providing
scenarios for learners to solve real-world problems
such as surgery preparation for medical students and
doctors. Serious games can be applied to areas of
education, healthcare, military and non-governmental
organizations as well as corporations. The so-called
advergame is a digital game designed to advertise
products and services for a small retail store [11].
Research shows that good product experience can be
brought by the creativeness and interactivity in the
games, where the customers feel appealed to and
hence more inclined to purchase the product [6]. In
general, serious game is a feasible means of
advertising and marketing.
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International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2014)
2.2.2 Serious Game in Tourism
Gamification is a concept of using game design
elements and game thinking in a non-gaming context
[1]. It increases brand awareness and encourage
consumer engagement [18]. Since hospitality and
travel industries put strong emphasis on experiences
co-created by tourists and service providers [16],
gamification can be used by tourism businesses for
marketing, sales and customer engagement.
TaiwanGoQ [12] is one of the tourism gamification
applications designed for touring in Taiwan (Figure).
To complete the levels in TaiwanGoQ, users have to
help the main character, named Q, answer questions
about tourist attractions in Taiwan and, in the process,
learn more about the places they are visiting. This
way, users can start experiencing their destinations
before arriving. However, the only reward of the App
is clearing levels; the App is done after all levels are
cleared. In other words, reusability is still lacking in
this example.
One of the largest advantages of O2O is the
possibility of placing orders online. For retailers, with
the help of social network, information of their
products can spread fast without much advertisement
cost; they can also serve potential customers who are
residing far away. For consumers, whoever chooses to
be notified of product discounts must also be those
willing to receive the latest product updates. Indeed,
several studies indicate stronger level of satisfaction
and loyalty in O2O because this service gives
customers unique experience on emotion and
epistemic motivation [2, 10]. For service providers,
the best strategy of O2O is to make information
access as easy as possible on the website [10]. With
the technology of location-based and mobile
applications, it becomes easier to bridge the gap
between the offline and online aspects [19].
The App presented in this study combines the
ideas of serious game, O2O model, open data and
location service, where the users are given access to
tourist information and rewarded with coupons for
shopping at local retail stores.
3. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
The proposed tourism service comprises three
elements: App, Apache server, and the database
(Figure). The back-end database is MySQL; it stores
all the open data collected from official open data
website in Taiwan. The names and attributes of open
data used in the system are listed in Table 1.
Information about the App is available at Google Play
[5].
(b)
(a)
Figure 2: (a) the start page of TaiwanGoQ App (b) the
levels in the game.
2.3 Online to Offline Model
The online to offline (O2O) model is applied to
improve user experience and reusability of
applications. In the Business to Business (B2B) and
Business to Consumer (B2C) business models of
electronic commerce, customers order products
online and the seller delivers goods by logistics
companies. These models are popular among most
companies and customers. However, research shows
only 8% of all transactions occur online as opposed to
the other 92% in the physical store [9]. People seem
to still prefer shopping at bricks-and-mortar places.
More recently, restaurants, gym, movie theaters
and retailers promote their products online by social
network or instant messaging to attract customers to
the store (offline). On the one hand, consumers can
access the promotion details or catalogs for
opportunities of getting lower prices; on the other
hand, the sellers have more chance to demonstrate
their products and attract people to shop in-store.
Table 1: The attributes of each open dataset
Open data
The attributes
Restaurant
(name, information, address)
Hospital
(name, address)
Clinics
(name, address)
Post office, ATM
(county, township, address,
longitude , latitude)
Friends of Armed (address)
Forces Association
Taichung Parking (name, address)
Space
Taichung Tourism (area,
township,
name,
Factory
address,
phone
number,
homepage)
Electric
Automobile
Recharging
(address, longitude, latitude)
Hotel
(address)
C.T. Wu et al.: A Study of Open Data for Tourism Service
217
in Figure is the menu of Schedule Planning with
Taichung being checked as the tour destination. After
that, 6 spots are randomly chosen and recommended
to the user, who is given total freedom to modify the
suggestions with discretion. Real-time traffic
conditions and spot information are also made
available. Once the schedule is accepted by the user,
the schedule will be saved in the device for further
query.
Figure 3: Architecture of the App combined with
cloud and mobile services. The three main elements
are App, Apache server and PHP. Information is
acquired from the database, which stores
travel-related data
(a)
(b)
4. THE MOBILE APPLICATION
Once the user launches the App, as shown in
Figure, Schedule Planning, Schedule and Weather
Query, and Special Offer will be listed in the
navigation menu. The corresponding functions will be
discussed in the following sections.
(d)
(c)
Figure 5: The functions of Schedule Planning. (a)
destination selection (b) the recommended spots (c)
the traffic information (d) the spot information
Figure 4: Main menu of the App
4.1 Schedule Planning
For users who want to plan their journey in
advance, Schedule Planning can provide traffic and
suggest candidate destinations. For example, shown
4.2 Schedule and Weather Query
Figure(a) shows the main menu of Schedule
and Weather Query. Three services devised in the
Schedule and Weather Query, which are online
schedule query, offline schedule query, and latest
weather forecasts. The difference between online and
offline schedule queries (Figure(b), (c)) is that more
information such as destination navigation, the
location of hospital, clinic, and parking space will be
shown in the online query mode, while offline
schedule query has only the saved schedule. This is
because in the online mode, the App is allowed to
access the open data saved in the database. With both
online and offline query modes, users do not have to
enable data transmission all the time and can save the
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International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2014)
transmission fee. Weather is crucial for tourists in
arranging their itineraries and schedule, so the
weather forecast is also included in the user interface
and shown on the map by using the Google Maps API
Weather Layer (Figure(d)).
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 6: Functions of schedule querying. (a) The
menu of schedule query (b) the online schedule query
(c) the offline schedule query (d) the weather report.
this App. The collected treasure pieces can be
exchanged for coupons in the functions of Shop List
and Coupon Passbook.
Figure 7: The main menu of Special Offers
(a)
(b)
4.3 Special Offers
Special Offers demonstrates the concept of
serious game and O2O service in that tourists are
allowed to collect coupons for a discount in later
purchases. It is composed of three parts: Treasure
Collection, Shop List and Coupon Passbook. The
main menu of special offer is shown in Figure.
4.3.1 Treasure Collection
In order to collect the coupons, users first need
to discover the treasure hidden near the spots while
traveling. The user interface is illustrated in Figure(a).
The locations of the spots are stored and provided by
an open database (Figure(b)). When the user reaches
near the location of the treasure, notification will
appear on the screen to show that a piece of treasure
is collected (Figure(d)). Links to the open data of
restaurant, ATM, and electric automobile recharging
are included in case the users need them while using
(c)
Figure 8: The functions of Treasure Collection. (a).
the main menu of treasure hunting (b) the treasure
map (c) treasure acquired.
4.3.2 Shop List
The Shop List function is shown in Figure(a).
Users can choose their retail store of interest
C.T. Wu et al.: A Study of Open Data for Tourism Service
219
(Figure(a) to (c)) and exchange their collected
treasure pieces for coupons (Figure(d)). Therefore,
users are encouraged to travel to as many tourist spots
as possible.
(a)
(b)
Figure 10: Coupon Passbook. (a). The collected
coupons (b) An expired coupon.
5. CONCLUSION
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 9: The functions of Shop List. (a). the list of
shops (b) choose a shop of interest (c) information of
an exemplary shop (d) exchange for coupons
4.3.3 Coupon Passbook
The exchanged coupons will be saved in the
Coupon Passbook as shown in Figure(a). There are
three statuses of a coupon: expired, unused or used.
As a mistake-proofing mechanism against coupons
used in the wrong store, the App detects whether the
user is physically near the correct store and, if yes,
the coupons can be used; otherwise it cannot be used,
as is also the case of expired coupons (Figure(b)). All
the store clerks have to do is confirm the coupon
status from their customers. It is a simple and easy
task to maintain the system.
This paper presents a tourism service
application by using open data. Open data is released
to the public by relevant authorities and can be used
to serve convenience for all. Open data is released to
the public by relevant authorities and can be used to
serve convenience for all. The proposed tourism
service is composed of serious game, O2O service
with the integration of different sets of open data,
hence the users can save the trouble of performing
multiple App downloads and searching across them
for desired tour information. The user interface
presents the data graphically and is easy to use. To
enhance user experience and loyalty to the App,
location-based serious game and O2O model are
incorporated into the App, where coupons can be
obtained and exchanged for use in the local area,
promoting local businesses at the same time.
The formats of open data did not appear to be
well-organized when they were being accessed and
collected in this study, and this can make it difficult
for application developers to utilize open data well.
How to keep the open data up to date and automate
data preprocessing will be the focus of our future
studies.
AKNOWLEGEMENT
This study is supported in part by Ministry of
Science and Technology R.O.C. under the Grants
NSC 102-2218-E-029-005.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Chien-Te Wu received his BE from the Department
of Computer Science, National Central University in
2008, and MS from the Department of Computer
Science, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, in
2010. His PhD education started in 2010 and is under
pursuit. His interest areas include digital content,
pattern recognition, medical image processing.
Shun-Chung Liu received his MS from the
Department of Computer Science, Tunghai
University, Taichung, Taiwan, in 2014. His interest
areas include open source, digital content, and mobile
service.
Chao-Fang Chu obtained his MSc in bioinformatics
and BSc in biological science and technology from
National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
His research interests include bioinformatics,
data-mining, mobile service and traditional Chinese
herbal medicine.
Yen-Ping Chu is a Professor in the Computer
Science at Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan. His
research interests include digital content, e-Learning,
and open source.
Shyr-Shen Yu received his BE from the Dept. of
Math., National Taiwan Normal University in 1981,
and MS from the Dept. of Applied Math., National
Chung-Hsing University in 1986. He took his MS and
PhD degrees from the Dept. of Computer Science, the
University of Western Ontario in 1988 and 1990.
Currently, he is a professor in the Dept. of Computer
Science and Engineering of National Chung-Hsing
University. His major research interests are pattern
recognition, image processing, and bioinformatics.
(Received August 2014, revised September 2014,
accepted September 2014)
C.T. Wu et al.: A Study of Open Data for Tourism Service
Open Data 在旅遊服務上之研究
吳建德 1*、劉舜中 2、朱昭昉 3、朱延平 2、喻石生 1
1
國立中興大學資訊科學與工程系
台中市南區國光路 250 號
2
東海大學資訊工程系
台中市西屯區臺灣大道四段 1727 號
3
台灣雲端服務協會
台中市南屯區五權西路二段 666 號 14 樓之 2
摘要
近年來世界各地日漸重視開放資料(open data)的發展，台灣在2013年正式成立開放資
料平台，在此平台裡收集了食、醫、住、行等類型的資料集。民眾自由存取資料，是
開放資料的精神之一，也因此促成許多對民眾生活有用應用的開發。本文利用台中、
南投與彰化縣市地方政府的開放資料，提出一個旅遊服務的手機應用程式(App)。這
個App使用圖形化介面呈現遊客在旅遊過程中，所需要的旅遊資料，同時結合嚴肅遊
戲(serious game)與手機使用者的互動過程，達到線上線下的結合(online to offline,
O2O)。圖形化的介面中，整合了交通、住宿與旅遊景點等資訊，為了讓進入旅遊景點
的遊客與當地商家有更多互動，促進當地經濟活動，並增加App的使用率，本App的
嚴肅遊戲透過定位服務(location service)，透過在遊戲中換取折價券的方式，鼓勵遊客
在當地消費。本研究應用旅遊服務相關的開放資料，帶給遊客不同的旅遊體驗，同時
串起線上與線下營銷。
關鍵詞：開放資料、嚴肅遊戲、線上線下營銷
（*聯絡人：[email protected]）
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