VisitEurope.com_1

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Vienna (pts040/23.03.2006/18:00) - On Tuesday, March 21th, the European Tourism Destination Portal visiteurope.com was launched by European Commission's Vice President Verheugen at the European Tourism Ministers' Conference in Vienna.

"The European Tourism Destinations Portal project (ETD Portal project) is just the beginning to strengthen tourism in Europe through more cooperation, communication and networking." said Mr. Francesco Ianniello, Head of the European Commission Tourism Unit, thanking the Vienna-based E-Commerce Competence Centre (EC3) for successfully completing "one of the most important and concrete initiatives carried out, at European level, in the last years".

The portal was funded by the European Commission, so that 34 European National Tourist Offices (NTOs) can bundle and market their tourism services. EC3 and its consortium were responsible for the design and development of the portal, this task was finished in December 2005, when the portal was handed over to the European Travel Commission (ETC). The ETC is responsible for the operation of the portal.

Background
VisitEurope.com was created as a single reference point for the promotion of European tourist destinations overseas. A consortium headed by EC3, including LiXto, eCTRL, Siemens and Tiscover, designed and developed the portal over the last 18 months to meet the needs of European and international tourists.

The portal is not a competitor for existing NTOs websites, but an additional traffic generator and marketing tool. Content from the 34 participating NTOs will be aggregated, with the addition of Pan-European advanced services. For in-depth information about a country, the portal links to the respective NTO website.

The conceptual and technical design of the portal are unique, based on intelligent content aggregation and linking, with the multilingual tourist information of the whole continent presented in a way that makes it possible to offer cross-country tourism services.

Highlights
· Initially, the portal features a user interface in three languages : English, French and Portuguese. More languages (German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Russian) will be added in the near future.
· The most advanced and effective recommendation technology for the tourism domain is used for dynamically generating Pan-European holiday offers.
· An ontology-based, semantic web search functionality will be available, allowing users to get cross-language search results for their queries.
· To make checking flights easier, the portal provides a wrapper-based flight search engine that includes both national carriers but also low-cost airlines.
· The portal also offers a Pan-European event database by utilising 'Harmonise' technology to automatically retrieve event data from National Tourist Offices.

EC3 - E-Commerce Competence Centre
EC3 is both a research institute, backed by a network of cooperating companies and Universities. Funded by public and private money, its research and development activities cover all areas of E-Commerce, e-business and m-commerce.

This includes new system architectures with semantic web, (semantic) web services, interface design and (web) evaluation, data mining, warehousing and statistics, modelling and optimisation in the domain of business models.

In conjunction with its networking activities it has positioned itself as an internationally renowned point of reference in this domain. Besides being a real world laboratory developing and testing new technologies and methods, it also puts research results into practice, contributing to industrial innovation.

Contact:

Alexandra Steiner

EC3 - E-Commerce Competence Center
PR & Marketing

Donau-City-Straße 1
A-1220 Vienna
Tel.: +43 (1) 522 71 71 23
Fax: +43 (1) 522 71 71 71
alexandra.steiner@ec3.at
www.ec3.at

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