Diskover. Towards a new tourism model: personalised, “slow” and quality
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October 27, 2022The Covid-19 crisis and the total paralysation of tourism revealed the need to change the tourism model, with a focus on tourists’ greater personal awareness of the human, natural and cultural environment. However, despite new proposals that opt for more public spaces, more integration with nature and more experience with local elements, among other factors, two years later there is a need for a new model based on decentralisation and deseasonalisation of the territory.
With this aim, Diskover was created to transform the tourism model, decentralise and deseasonalise flows, and boost local tourism and local retailers. In addition, the objective is to create an awareness of “slow”, quality tourism.
Diskover has developed an app that incorporates in just one platform all the agents of the sector: tourists, businesspeople, local inhabitants, tourism developers and government bodies, with a collaborative approach. In addition, it opts for heritage assets that are not published on the internet, to strengthen collective knowledge of the territory.
The main milestones that Diskover will achieve are:
- Show the wealth of cultural, historical and natural heritage in the environment that is closest to users and contribute to reducing the carbon footprint by encouraging shorter journeys all year round.
- Decentralise tourism flows with a differentiated solution, offering over twenty thousand points of interest within reach of the users.
- Provide experiences based fundamentally on knowledge, learning and conservation of the territory.
- Take advantage of innovation and digitalisation as tools to reinvent the tourism model, making it more personalised, respectful and “slow”.
Contribution of the DAMA group
Diskover is equipped with leading technology, due to technology transfer from Sparksee, a spin-off of the Data Management (DAMA) research group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) that is specialised in the research and transfer of software and technologies based on data management.
It is the first graph database for mobile devices and embedded systems. This technology plays a crucial role in the recommendation of points of interest made by the app, to provide a base of knowledge of the individual from their mobile device.
How does this technology work in Diskover?
Each point of interest in Diskover is associated with some words or labels that describe it (for example, “monument”, “architecture” and “gastronomy”), to form a graph. Thus, the application learns what the user likes as they visit or interact with each point of interest, and accumulates data on the past activity of the person on the app.
In this way, when the user enters the Diskover app, they will see an ordered list of recommended elements, depending on their preferences. This is possible due to artificial intelligence algorithms and, specifically, to graph search algorithms for relevance, which have the same capabilities as humans to make recommendations for the user based on their interests.
You can download the Diskover App by clicking here.
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