5. Next steps
The future plans for the Observatory are guided by our stakeholder research and continuing engagement to help us understand data needs.
Developing the website
We have revised the structure of the website to make data easier to find information and to cope with the increased data content planned for the coming year.
The website currently uses existing data which has been analysed and made available in various ways. This "open data" is able to be used and shared as necessary. We will continue to look for existing data sources to help meet data needs and reach out to other organisations which have data, so we can combine resources to build a rich picture of tourism in Scotland. This will include data for sectors including events and festivals, transport, activities, attractions and food and drink. Possibilities to include data from commercial sources will also be investigated.
We are also continuing to build and refine our data pipeline which gathers and processes the data, ready for analysis and visualisation.
Data challenge projects
We are now embarking on several large scale data projects, aiming to solve some of the key challenges faced with data for tourism in Scotland. For each of these projects, the process is the same -
- consultation with stakeholders to better understand their needs
- scoping and planning the project
- investigating solutions
Due to capacity / time constraints within the Insight team and the challenge these project present, they will be multi-year projects, but with regular outputs and updates provided here. These projects are: