Fundació IBIT - Illes Balears Innovació Tecnològica

The IBIT Foundation's tourism and new technologies department is working on technologies that will help to sell the destination and tourist products and manage them with commitment to sustainable development, knowledge management and the environment in order to make the right decisions in an efficient time frame.

Intelligent environments in the tourism sector

Following European directives, the IBIT Foundation has begun to promote the field of ubiquitous computing based on devices applied to the tourism sector – so-called Ambient Intelligence (AmI). The term Ambient Intelligence is an attempt to establish a new vision in which the physical environment that surrounds us becomes the interface for access to information and the services users might demand, such as the possibility, for example, of downloading tourist information from Bluetooth coverage points installed inside hotels. Wireless network technology and mobile devices form the technological basis for constructing this kind of intelligent environment.

Intelligent agents in the tourism context

Agent-based computing is becoming one of the most promising paradigms for the automation of web tasks. It is another of the technologies the IBIT Foundation has to encourage as a priority for tourism. The tourism sector is characterised by being a tremendously varied sector. It is made up of a large variety of companies and organisations operating in the market and offering very diverse services: on one hand, there are tourist accommodation establishments; on the other, transport and vehicle hire firms, intermediaries like travel agencies (both wholesale and retail) and finally suppliers of complementary ranges of services (restaurants, leisure, excursions, etc.).

Despite the diversity of services tourists are offered by tourist companies from a region, the tourist destination has to offer an integrated view, as if it was a single product, trying to make the destination profitable and offering the best overall service to tourists.

The best way for a user to have an integrated view of all the services a tourist destination offers is to allow users to plan their trips from a single access point. Given the enormous task involved in preparing a trip (choosing preferred destinations, checking available flights and accommodation places, possible routes and tourist visits, times of access to leisure services, etc.), it is desirable that users should have an intelligent agent carrying out this task for them.

Intelligent agents allow users to specify their holiday preferences and restrictions, with the agent accessing the necessary services (going through different websites) to prepare the details of the holiday automatically. The agent’s activity will also extend throughout the tourist's stay at the tourist destination, offering an assistance service during the trip (warning, for example, of possible time changes of services and offering new alternatives).

Services provided by intelligent agents:

The possibility of specifying travel preferences and restrictions (the type of trip, how much the user is prepared to spend, the destination, the type of accommodation, dates, etc.).
The search for georeferenced information and tourist services (accommodation, transport and vehicle hire and additional services).
Access to tourist services to make bookings.

All these services used together make it possible to launch an intelligent agent to carry out an overall holiday planning task and to provide assistance during the trip.

Encouragement of participation in international framework programmes

Participation in the European EUREKA programme

With the aim of extending results in the commercial sphere of R+D provided by projects on technologies applied to tourism to Spain and Europe, the IBIT Foundation is promoting participation in the European EUREKA programme under the auspices of the EUROTOURISM consortium. The aim of this European consortium, set up and led by Spain, is the sustainable improvement of tourism by means of R+D+I. The EUROTOURISM consortium is intended to generate projects producing innovative products, processes and technology-based services of commercial interest.

Carrying out projects that produce products which SMEs and tourist companies can afford will mean it can be extended to the rest of Spain and to European regions sharing the same interests as the Balearic Islands to increase competitiveness, thanks to the encouragement of new technologies applied to the tourism sector.

Participating in the 6th European Union Framework Programme

Concerning the 6th Framework Programme, the projects carried out by the IBIT Foundation establish the basis for implementing the infrastructure necessary for taking part in other projects in which more advanced architectures are developed.

The opening of the 6th Framework Programme begins lines of action encouraging projects led by organisations and companies with a solid R+D component and a strong presence on the European scene. It is this context where the IBIT Foundation will strengthen its participation in projects to develop case studies in which it can experiment with more advanced technologies.

Specifically, such participation will be encouraged by following these directives:

Ambient Intelligence in the tourism sector: The creation of intelligent environments using wireless devices is one of the priorities defined by the European Commission in the 6th Framework Programme. It is planned to encourage the development of projects aimed at putting into practice the scenarios put forward by the Commission, which will particularly benefit the tourism sector.
The semantic web and peer-to-peer networks (P2P): there will also be the results of the European IST project SWAP (Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer) (SWAP project link) in which the IBIT Foundation is taking part as a partner in creating a case study for the implementation of a knowledge network in the Balearic Islands. The aim of this project is to improve the results of combining semantic web technologies (ontologies) with peer-to-peer networks (P2P). The results of the SWAP project can be used to experiment with wireless peer-to-peer networks in tourism environments, taking advantage of the infrastructure resulting from the AMIGUIDE (link). The idea is to create a network of tourists who can share knowledge about the tourist destination during their holidays using PDAs, following a P2P model. The aim is to create a wireless network of in situ recommendations about the tourist destination, fostering the quality and competitiveness of the companies in the sector. This approach may also help implement the intelligent environment scenarios proposed in the previous point in combination with P2P networks.
Intelligent mobile agents in the tourism sector: one of the marked trends in the European environment is the encouragement of computing based on agents for the creation of task automation environments. The growing interest in agent technology is demonstrated in the European Network of Excellence: AgentLink, where participation in projects is encouraged.