Challenge

Year by year, GastroSuisse is publishing new data of the hotel and restaurant industry in a print edition. GastroSuisse is going to publish some of these data on its website. The association needs proposals how to structure and depict the data, and how to make them interactive for the member of GastroSuisse. The member should be able to compare its company with some benchmarks.

GastroSuisse has no online solution today. It is planned to integrate something like a dashboard into the existing GastroSuisse website. On the website of Gastro Suisse a closed area for members and an open area for everyone shall be created. In the closed area members should be able to make comparisons (focus benchmarking). The challenge is mainly about ideas on how to build a dashboard: focus on design, functions and structure, as well as optimal customer guidance.

The target group of the Streamline Publication Concept are members of GastroSuisse (hotels & restaurants). Member surveys offer information and data about turnover, cost structure, success according to turnover size, rental costs, cost of goods, annual wage total, etc. which can be used for the Streamline Publication Concept. Gastro Suisse has never gone deeper than the cantonal level due to the anonymity of members. Cantonal and national benchmarks should be possible within the online solution.

There are no limits to your imagination and creativity when meeting the challenge and designing a website, dashboard. The existing print solution should not be used as a template for the online solution/dashboard. The hack teams should be completely free to develop their own ideas.

By Vimal Vignarajah

Team

Peter Janes, Riza Mizrak, Christophe Nickel, Edward Parrales

Envisaged Deliverables

• Dashboard Proof of Concept - embedded in web site
• Project Proposal - options, cost, plan

Mock-up of envisaged target solution

Integration into existing Gastro Suisse website

Potential Platform / Tools

To be assessed and evaluated

• Tableau
• PowerBI
• Visual Studio - implementation of existing solution Walliser Tourismus Observatorium
• Data Studio

Requirements - Interaction

• Filtering (by Kanton, sector, etc.)
• Personalization > requires member profiles
• Benchmarking - comparison with peers > requires highlighting of own categories
• Trends - development over time > requires time series
• Member profile data - equivalent to survey data

Prototypes

Microsoft PowerBI Implementation

Interactive Dashboard - click on Kanton bars and see how the rest of the dashboard updates (data source: HESTA)

Google Data Studio Implementation

Dashboard Prototype - single selection; data can be used directly (data source: Gastro Suisse survey, question 1)

Dashboard Prototype (Google Data Studio implementation) - multiple selection; data is "normalised" for better representation (data source: Gastro Suisse survey, question 3)

Tableau Implementation

Dashboard prototype; no interaction available due to license restrictions

Proof of Concept (PoC)

This is how the Gastro Suisse interactive dashboard could like like as part of the interactive website (Microsoft PowerBI implementation).

Member access (closed user group) for additional functionality: user "gastrosuisse_admin", password "gastrosuisse"

Project Proposal

Presentation - for the management of our challenge "sponsor" Vimal Vignarajah

In tourism service a reliable and rapid email management system plays a crucial role. Countless queries are coming in daily and must be sorted in laborious work by their employees. In this challenge a tool that recognizes email queries and stores them in the appropriate folder or even answers automatically to the easiest or most repetitive ones should be developed.

In a tourism office innumerable emails are received daily. Most of the time even experienced employees have to decide if they want to answer the queries themselves or if they prefer to forward them. Even simple requests that can be answered automatically have to be processed. In order to structure the flood of messages, all emails are manually moved to the appropriate categories (folders in the inbox) according to their content. An automatic email triage could be a big relief for the employees. The emails are stored in subfolders created especially for different categories in the inbox. The tool should be able to automatically move incoming emails to the appropriate folders. It might even be useful to have it answer the simplest or most repetitive queries itself. For testing and training the application a dataset with content from over 5000 emails from tourism offices is provided.

The tourist information offices in both Arosa and Lenzerheide staff their offices according to how many tourists they expect to be contacted by. The process of staffing the office relies on experience and laborious mapping of the next months events, season, holidays etc.

Customer requirements: The tourist office would like a tool to facilitate and enhance the prediction of tourist requests.

Potential Key Deliverables: Forecasting tool one month prior.

Out of Scope: Predictions for the sub-branch offices/ information points.

Potential Challenge: A prediction tool should forecast the amount of tourist requests throughout different channels such as phone calls, emails, and front desk per month. The prediction depends on a variety of factors including events, school holidays, public holidays, season and weather. The importance of these factors should be explained.

Results

Details on the implementation of the project during the hackdays can be found here. The Lenzerheide files are in the repo "forecast5.0" and the Arosa ones in repo "forecast5.1".

You can find the final presentation as well as a demo of our forecast here.

Enjoy!

Challenge

With the Guest Card Lucerne, overnight guests in Lucerne benefit from the following offers:

• Public transport: Free use of buses and trains in fare zone 10 in the city of Lucerne
• Activities: Various discounts for mountain railways, museums and excursions in the Lucerne-Vierwaldstättersee adventure region
• WLAN: free use of WLAN network "Free WiFi - LUZERN.COM" at selected locations

In addition to information on the demographic data of overnight guests, there is currently also data on guest card checks and the devaluation of services and hotel operations. 7 days after the guest's departure, the data is anonymised.

The content of the Challenge "Guest Card Lucerne" is to develop a concept for the expansion of data generation and data use of the Guest Card Lucerne. Let your creativity run free about which guest information could be won, processed and used and how. All with the aim of strengthening the tourism offer of the Lake Lucerne-Vierwaldstättersee Adventure Region and individualising the guest experience.

Documentation

First, Michael and Domi started with a detailed presentation of the challenge so the whole team could start on the same ground. Then the team brainstormed and elaborated all the relevant stakeholders within the challenge:

a) Tourists/ Visitors b) Lucerne Tourism/ the city of Lucerne c) Service Providers (such as shops, restaurants, cafés/ bars, museums etc. in Lucerne) d) hotels and accommodations and e) public transport.

As a next step each member of the team individually worked out the issues for each and every stakeholder that do/ might exist today and we then collected ideas and potential solutions for these issues (keeping the Guest-Card concept – as it exists today – in mind) by writing everything on post-its and putting them on a whiteboard, in the respective section. After the individual brainstorming session we read through all the different ideas together, discussed and evaluated them section by section and used blue post-its to summarise the collected ideas (and prioritise some of them) in each section (fig.1).

We decided to put the result of the brainstorming-session into a Google Doc and let each team-member document one stakeholder section and also add and list some benefits for the stakeholder, pertaining to the issues and solutions elaborated in the group before. We then read through the document all together, discussed each stakeholder again and agreed on a few adjustments. On the basis of repeated and detailed discussions we were able to narrow down all significant factors to this project and came up with – or rather proved a presupposed – overall solution: a Guest Card Application.

A next big step included figuring out all the important functions the application would need to have in order to realise its full potential. This, among other things, meant identifying all the weaknesses and missing functions of the existing Guest Card. But also, how the application could at the same time satisfy the user's needs AND simplify and improve the collection of data that will be beneficial for further development of the app (and therefore again for the user) and of course, for Lucerne Tourism. Once all the functions were decided, we returned to the remaining stakeholders and made sure that the same functions will have benefits for them as well.

All details of the project are documented in the Google Document (under "Sources" button), which also gives insight to the above described process.

Detailled problem description:

The timetables for the Bodenseeschifffahrt (Lake Constance navigation) are not coordinated. This poses the following painpoints:
- long waiting times for guests
- Laborious manual coordination of timetables by the tourimus office staff and guests

Detailled Customer Requirements:

- best possible/most eventful, most beautiful route is calculated
- quick and easy customer advice
- optionally increase sales

Potential Key Deliverables:

Individualized travel guide

Out of Scope:

Adaptation of timetables

Potential Challenge:

Customizable travel guide: Create an itinerary so that there is no waiting time or the waiting time can be combined with visiting nearby attractions. In a first step, the prototype must be developed for use by the tourismus office staff. In the medium to long term, Thurgau-Bodenseetourismus would like to make an individualised travel guide available to its guests as a self-service offer.

Result

A web app was created to support the employees in the tourist offices when assisting visitors with their itinerary.

Concept

A mockup is available here: Presentation

Based on the visitors initial preferences and the available time, a customized tour will be generated. Based on former data (popularity, number of tourists etc.) the tool will learn to make better suggestions. The employee has the opportunity to then adapt the plan from the available options according to the customers wishes. Every time a change is made, there is an option for the tool to recalculate and optimize.

The following open data and data provided by the tourism organization are used currently:
- Object data of tourism organization members
- Transport opendata
- outdooractive
- guidle
- tripadvisor

The solution could implemented in any tourism region in Switzerland based on different data sources. The tool could be made available as a self-service mobile app for tourists.

Demo
Web App

More documentation and data
Project Folder

Team

• Carole Mattmann
• Vanya
• Julia
• Urs
• Iwona Fluda
• Adrian Braunwalder

You can find the link to the prototype via the "Homepage" button.

Our goal was to prepare the data that Jana Von Holzen provided us with her Maturaarbeit and to integrate that data into Wikimedia, WikiData and OpenStreetMap. We managed quite a few things:

• we prepared data from fountains located in Nidwalden and Luzern with Python scripts
• made a few OSM entries for Luzern and Nidwalden fountains
• made WikiData entries for Nidwalden fountains including pictures
• added information where it was missing
• and wrote a general How-To for people on GitHub (see source code link), that are interested in taking part in this ongoing project.

Possible next steps:

• Adding additional fountain information.
• Is it wheelchair accessible?
• Are dogs allowed?
• Bottle filling possible?
• Who is the artist?
• Capactiy?
• Historic text?
• Short URLs?

We also hope to open new possibilities for tourism organisations and travel enthusiasts to explore switzerland's fountains. It's ideal for bicycle tours as well as historic fountain tours & sightseeing suggestions. The water fountains Project could also contribute to ecological awareness, since filling bottles helps reduce plastic waste.

Challenge statement

Highschool graduate Jana von Holzen created an interdisciplinary overview of more than 100 water fountains of canton Nidwalden in her thesis called "Nidwaldner Brunnen" (Maturaarbeit Oct. 2017 Stans MS Word docs.

This data has been published as a website. To serve to a broader public, this information should be made «open data» including uploading the images in Wikimedia Commons and integrating further data into OpenStreetMap and Wikidata. Raw fountain data already online here .

The benefit of this challenge is that the base information becomes available beyond the current website, e.g. in water-fountains.org and in many other applications leveraging open data repositories.

Key deliverables:

• Upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons
• Integrate data into OpenStreetMap
• Integrate data into Wikidata.
• Extend the water-fountains.org (h2o) framework to list sources or dimensions of fountain.

Main contact: Ralf Hauser

Status

We have collected strictly anonymous and open access data, analyzed it using open source libraries in the Python language, and created a minimal demo application shown in the slides above. Visit our open source repository to see details in the README, give us your ★, leave us an 🗨️ Issue with your questions.

The Challenge

Imagine you are responsible in the city of Lucerne (or any other Swiss city) to plan for better pedestri-an infrastructure. For this you need to know how many people walk past specific locations during a day. If you knew which two hours of the day you would need to count to extrapolate the data for the whole day and if you had a tool you could enter this data to automatically get the daily volumes your job would be a lot easier. Maybe the tool would even adjust for the day of the week or weather.

The problem is, at the moment no such tool exists and we don’t really know which hours are best for doing counts to extrapolate to data to the whole day. Based on data of automatic pedestrian counters in Zurich and Basel, pedestrian flow charts and extrapolation factors could be derived with clever algorithms. This then could be translated into a practical tool for entering the data to easily get results. The challenge is submitted for pedestrian volumes but the same would apply for bicycle data. No such tool exists in Switzerland – neither for walking nor for cycling data.

Further information with the link to data sources here.

Team

• Justus // @Jukamala
• Georg // @1b15
• Laurin // @1tchy
• Oleg // @loleg
• Daniel Sauter, Urban Mobility Research Expert

So, what are you doing this weekend..? 🌧️ #weatherpatterns #datascienceftw #opendatahackdays pic.twitter.com/4kY2FlsaR2

— icanhaz🌐pen? (@sodacamper) November 30, 2019

Inspiration

In addition to the analytical components, we have thought about the implications of this project in terms of open data publication, open source resources, and even to the possibility of an open hardware / solution to people counting. Visit our Slack channel for more background discussion.

By Wolf-Dieter - Own work, CC BY 2.5, Link

Introduction

Every tourist must pay a visitor's tax (Kurtaxe) for every night they are staying. The guests pay the tax directly to their host, who is responsible for correctly reporting the stays and relaying the collected taxes to the municipality.

Hotels must also report their overnight stays to the federal statistical office, which enables the municipalities to verify their reported stays rather easily. Leased apartments and houses have no further reporting responsibilities. The municipalities have therefore little to no tools to asses if the reported stays for these objects are correct.

The goal of this challenge is to develop data driven tools to facilitate the control of reported overnight stays.

Requirements

A comparison of visitor's tax with the previous year is to be made. For this, as many data sources as possible should be used to evaluate the overnight stays of the community Flumserberg. These should be compared with the paid visitor's tax.

Provided data

A list with all apartments inclusive number and size of rooms of Flums, one measurement per day of the wastewater data of the last 3 years in Flumserberg and a small part of the neighbouring area, 1035 measurements in total with precipitation and weather code and monthly electricity data for the municipality of Flumserberg from January 2017 to September 2019. Population figures for Flumserberg municipality at monthly level from February 2017 onwards

Deliverables

A dashboard with the key figures how big the deviation is, possibly which holiday homes are affected. A list of the holiday apartments that are obliged to pay visitor's tax and the number of overnight stays reported vs. the real number of overnight stays.

Update I: Chosen approaches

The project team explored and evaluated the existing data. The members decided on these methods:

1. Using a WebCrawler, the project team wants to check if all online posted houses/appartments are officially registered.

2. Collect and preprocess that data so it can be used for Machine learning.

3. Using a various linear models and random Forest, the project team wants to create a model to find inconstancies in the water consumption.

4. Using Time series analysis to identify tends, seasonality, in the behaviour of the heidiland region and identify any discrepencies.

Deliverables

Crawler that queries the Airbnb API to check if there are accomodatations that are posted online are registered at the municipitality

Script that prepocess the datasources provided by the tourism organization into a single data frame. Given that not all the data comes in the same granularity it is possible to

Time series analysis of electicity/water consumption versus over night stays

Data & Results

You can find all data, analyses and results under the button "Sources".

Der WC-Guide ist im Prinzip für alle Menschen gedacht, jedoch standen bei der Projektidee vor allem Menschen im Vordergrund, welche in ihrem Alltag auf öffentliche Toiletten angewiesen sind, um z.B. einen Ausflug unbeschwert geniessen zu können.

Bei jedem Ausflug ist es gut zu wissen, wo es öffentliche Toiletten gibt. Diese Information kommt allen touristischen Destinationen zugute, besonders wenn auch die Daten frei zugänglich sind.

Der WC-Guide ist ein Verzeichnis öffentlicher Toiletten der Schweiz und enstand 2008 in privater Initiative. Mehr Infos: https://www.sonnenschauer.ch/projekte/wc-guide/.

Dieses Jahr wurde eine komplett neue PWA (Progressiv Web App) Webseite entwickelt, welche die bisherigen Apps für iPhone und Android ersetzt. Diese App ist als OpenSource auf GitHub verfügbar: https://github.com/wc-guide

Zusätzlich möchten wir unsere ca. 5'000 Toiletten-Datensätze als Open Data veröffentlichen und zwar in Wikidata und OpenStreetMap (OSM) - ähnlich wie beispielsweise die Burgen-Dossier-Karte (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH/Burgen-Dossier/ ) oder wie Water-Fountains (https://water-fountains.org/ ).

Mögliche Aufgaben / Arbeitspakete:

• Aufarbeitung (Skripting) und Import der Daten in Wikidata
• Aufarbeitung (Skripting) passend zu Tools wie OSM Conflator (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Conflator ) oder aber zu Maproulette.org.
• Skripts, die Listen erzeugen zum Abgleich der Datenquellen.
• Konzept / Ansätzen zur Synchronisierung/Abgleich von OSM und Wikidata

Die Lage (Koordinate) ist typischerweise ein identifizierendes Merkmal. Folgende Merkmale/Attribute sind zu ergänzen: Toilettentyp (Normal, Behindertengerecht, Pissoir), Bemerkungen, Eigenschaften wie Wickeltisch, kostenpflichtig etc.

Das Handling von Redundanzen, d.h. von Toiletten, die bereits in OSM vorhanden sind, ist sehr wichtig. Doppelte Einträge können z.B. über den Standort ermittelt werden.

Wichtig ist auch die Sicherstellung der Datenqualität. Bisher wurden die eingetragenen/bearbeiteten Toiletten einzeln durch WC-Guide kontrolliert und wenn ok freigegeben.

Daten

Als Arbeitsmaterial für die Hackdays wurden die Toiletten von Luzern als XML zusammengestellt, d.h. ca. 80 Datensätze. Diese können hier abgerufen werden: https://sonnenschauer.net/xml/wcguide-toilets-luzern.xml

Key "typ"
Toilettentyp als Nummer von 1-4.
1 = Normale Toilette (normal toilet)
2 = Normale und Behinderten-Toilette (normal and disabled toilet)
3 = Eurokey Toilette (eurokey toilet, Daten von Pro Infirmis)
4 = Pissoir (urinal)

Key "options"
Eigenschaften der Toiletten als Nummern von 1-5, kommagetrennt:
1 = Kostenpflichtig (fee required)
2 = Wicketisch (changing table)
3 = Stufe/Treppe (step/stair)
4 = Handlauf (handrail)
5 = Nette Toilette

Die anderen Keys sollten selbsterklärend sein.

Wir freuen uns über jede Mitarbeit an der Zukunft des WC-Guide!

Da wahrscheinlich nicht alle Herausforderungen an den Hackdays gelöst werden können, sind wir über jede längerfristige Zusammenarbeit dankbar. Vielen Dank!

Infos und Kontakt: Adriano Fattizzo, kontakt@sonnenschauer.net

At selected locations in the city of Lucerne, overnight guests with the "Guest Card Lucerne" have the opportunity to connect to the free WiFi network "Free WiFi - LUZERN.COM". Over a period of one year, over 30’000 successfully logins have been registered. What insights the city of Lucerne can gain from knowing WLAN data? This challenge focuses on the added value for the user. No monetary goals are aimed at. The customer experience is to be improved. E.g. see where the guests spend most of their time or how many people pass by a location?

The following information about the public WLAN is available (if activated):

• Location
• Device connections (number)
• Successful WLAN logins (number)
• Failed WLAN registrations (number)
• Generated traffic (number in gigabytes)

Of course, you can use any other (open)data to build a solution/service that should help the tourism region Luzern to make their location more attractive to any people.

For challenge-results click "Homepage".