Wonderful Copenhagen is a foundation that works with more than 300 tourist attractions, tour operators, restaurants, theaters, and other partners to develop the tourism industry in and around Copenhagen, Denmark.
In an increasingly connected, monitored, and analyzed world, there is no shortage of data. There is also no shortage of technologies that can be used to analyze that data. What is in short supply at all too many organizations is the specialized knowledge necessary to take full advantage of all this data and all these tools.
"Our customers have two main needs when it comes to working with data," says Aileen Gemma Smith, chief executive officer and cofounder of Vizalytics. "The first is locating and then connecting to the most relevant data, which could be stored in many different systems and formats, both inside and outside an organization's firewall. The second is figuring out how best to find the most value in it.”
"The number of guests coming to the Capital Region of Denmark has increased about 6 percent a year since 2009, and nothing indicates that this trend will change in the future," says Tine Kühnel, the digital business developer at Wonderful Copenhagen. "The task we face is how to inspire guests to experience an even wider variety of attractions throughout the whole year.”
Wonderful Copenhagen knew that its best answers to these questions lay in the large volume of mobility data it holds about tourist movement throughout the Copenhagen area. Wonderful Copenhagen released a request for proposal for a data analysis pilot project that could ingest data from disparate sources and support better decision-making by its partners—without requiring any data science expertise.
After evaluating the many submitted proposals, Wonderful Copenhagen decided to engage with Vizalytics. For the pilot project, Vizalytics worked with Wonderful Copenhagen to build a predictive data model based on the Vizalytics City Builder platform. The pilot project explored how this model could help Wonderful Copenhagen and its partners better understand where visitors go and when, how long they stay at individual attractions, where they go next, and how weather and event schedules affect their visits. The model ingests not only the organization's internal data held but also publicly available information such as weather patterns.
Vizalytics City Builder makes extensive use of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The solution's core Knowledge Graph runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) clusters. The solution also uses AWS Lambda to execute code in response to events and Amazon Kinesis to ingest and process real-time streaming data. Vizalytics, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Standard Technology Partner since 2012 and now a member of the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, sees AWS as crucial to its long-term strategy.
"We were born in the AWS Cloud for ease of use, constant innovation, and a global reach that allows us to serve customers just about anywhere in the world," says Smith. "Our APN membership takes the already excellent experience of using AWS services to the next level, with even more hands-on service and support, assistance in designing proofs of concept, and introductions to other partners throughout the AWS ecosystem."
A High-Level Look at the Wonderful Copenhagen Production Architecture on AWS
With this pilot project, Wonderful Copenhagen demonstrated that by using Vizalytics on AWS, the organization can find value not only in its own disparate data, but also in that of its partners and third parties. "The Vizalytics pilot project showed the potential to trace entire tourist seasons, identify bottlenecks and opportunities, and help us deliver data-driven value to our partners," says Kühnel. "For example, we can tell our partners how a rainy day will affect arrivals and departures from their attractions, so they can strategize accordingly.”
Although the Vizalytics solution doesn't require Wonderful Copenhagen to interact with the underlying AWS services it consumes, Smith says that AWS is key to the solution's power and flexibility. "Our customers evolve so much in their use of our solution as they start to ask new questions, find new datasets, or start new projects. Because AWS services are so flexible, so affordable, and so frequently updated and improved, we can stay focused on helping our customers understand and make better decisions based on data, even when they don’t have any data science expertise."
Learn more about the AWS Public Sector Partner Program.
Vizalytics Technology uses Knowledge Graph, a proprietary solution for graph-database machine learning, to ingest event and logistical data in disparate sources and formats and to generate contextual insights for its customers. The company's founders started Vizalytics in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when it became clear that many affected businesses and communities had an acute need for better access to and understanding of the huge volume of public data available to them. The New York–based company now works with customers ranging from nonprofits with tiny budgets to governments and large private enterprises around the world.
For more information, connect with Vizalytics through its listing on the APN Partner Solution Finder.