# Customer Reviews as Open Data: A Call to a Collaborative Effort in Tourism and Smart City

## Online customer reviews have gained significant importance for the tourism industry
* A majority of consumers actively seek out reviews before making a purchase decision, as reviews elicit high credibility and reliance in comparison with information provided by third party editors or advertisements
* Reviews influence online reputation, discoverability (SEO), and economic success of tourism-related businesses
* Reviews are a valuable information-based asset for gaining insights about customers and competitors, and to drive and measure operational improvements
* Reviews provide a qualitative information layer that allows for recommendations based on available factual data

## With their growing importance, it has become a problem that reviews are kept proprietary and fragmented across data silos
* **Barriers for research**: while reviews represent big data, the datasets made available to researchers are mostly fragmented and small in size, disallowing the effective use of state-of-the-art analysis methods, or comparisons across platforms, or across time
* **Barriers for entrepreneurs**: experimentation with technologies that facilitate human decision-making by predicting and surfacing relevant information based on reviews is limited to the proprietary platforms, thereby further increasing monopolistic structures
* **Increasing dependence** of hospitality service providers on dominant proprietary reviews services leads to exploitation (increasing commissions for OTAs, forcing businesses to pay for ads, increasing costs to display reviews on own websites)
* Lack of access to the data creates **inefficiencies** for hospitality service providers (high-effort reputation management across different platforms, no ability to analyse reviews systematically to drive operational improvement, no re-use on own website)
* Despite being crowd-sourced, reviews **cannot be used for the public good** (e.g., for smart cities, smart tourism ecosystems), losing out on opportunities to analyse real-time visitor and resident sentiment

## The proposed solution is Mangrove: an Open Data Ecosystem for Reviews on a global scale
The **vision** of the Mangrove initiative is a future in which everyone can share and make use of reviews freely.

The **goal** is therefore to **maximise the number of reviews** that people share in an open dataset versus proprietary data silos, **while ensuring** that the dataset remains open, and the privacy requirements of reviewers are respected.

The proposed **way to achieve this goal** is to **create an open data ecosystem for reviews** in a collaborative global effort of researchers, tourism-related businesses and associations, and smart city actors. If successful, it will not only solve the issues above, but will also create new opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurial activity, and better services.

> *IBM report [Expanding Innovation: It Takes an Ecosystem](https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/innovating-ecosystems#) on how high engagement in ecosystems facilitates innovation, lower costs, and higher revenue.*


For the ecosystem to succeed, the underlying technology has to ensure three main qualities:
* The data format has to be **useful** for as many parties as possible, so that the dataset is valuable and attractive to use.
* Capture as many aspects as necessary for different use cases
* Open and free-of-charge access
* The infrastructure needs to be **easy to integrate** into websites and apps for reading and writing reviews, so that the ecosystem gains integrators and the dataset grows.
* Clear technical standard that ensures interoperability
* Easy-to-use and well-documented APIs
* Clear legal framework to provide confidence in the integration
* The infrastructure needs to be **easy to maintain** at low cost and little overhead.
* Reliable and persistent database server
* Open source development to allow for redundancy and open innovation
* Effective governance structures to ensure the infrastructure can evolve as the needs of the ecosystem participants change

## Current status
The fundamental pieces of infrastructure have been developed and are available under Apache License 2.0 (https://gitlab.com/plantingspace/mangrove), ready for proof-of-concept integrations:
* **Technical standard** to ensure interoperability and allow reviews to be analyzed programmatically (data format, etc.): https://mangrove.reviews/standard
* Open-source **API and documentation** (REST API with an OpenAPI specification), allowing for easy submission and retrieval of reviews: https://docs.mangrove.reviews/
* **Client-side JS library** allowing interacting with the Mangrove server and managing of reviewer identity: https://js.mangrove.reviews/
* Open-source **probabilistic aggregation algorithm** to ensure reliability of the data: https://gitlab.com/plantingspace/mangrove/-/tree/master/aggregator
* **Demo web app** to showcase the capabilities of the infrastructure, allowing to read and write reviews for places (points of interest), legal entities, websites, books, and more: https://mangrove.reviews
* Defined **license agreements**: reviewers contribute content (opinion, media) under CC-BY (attribution to ensure that reviews cannot be modified without notification): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ / Software: Apache License 2.0

## How to participate
Mangrove is a **philanthropic project**, a private initiative for the public good. It has been started with the vision to solve a pressing issue by developing new technology, making it openly available, and by facilitating the creation of a community to collaboratively achieve its goal. Anyone interested in contributing to the Mangrove vision is welcome to **join as a member of the project, a contributor, or a user**. Members shall be responsible for the governance and shall elect a board in due course.

### Researchers
* Help validate the Mangrove infrastructure (technical standard, cryptographic IDs, …)
* Identify areas in research and industry that will benefit from open access to reviews
* Help promote the project and the dataset among researchers
* Help validate the legal framework and ecosystem architecture

### Tourism associations, DMOs, and Smart City actors
* Provide exposure and advocacy for the idea of an open data ecosystem for reviews
* Help identify tourism and hospitality businesses to participate in proof-of-concept integrations; provide financial support for proofs of concept where needed
* Integrate Mangrove into your websites to enable immediate testing and showcasing
* Integrate Mangrove early on into digital transformation projects in destinations (open data / knowledge graph efforts)

### Tourism and hospitality businesses
Integrate the Mangrove infrastructure into your business websites and apps to be able to interact directly with your customers (they will be more likely to book directly on your website if there are reviews, and not leave and book on an OTA).

### Navigation and Map applications
Integrate Mangrove into your app to allow users to (i) read and write reviews so they don't have to leave your app when seeking reviews, and to (ii) enable your app to display search results sorted by popularity, relevance, or other metrics.

### IT service providers, consultants, and entrepreneurs
* Develop useful extensions and products for tourism businesses and municipalities
* Build solutions to mirror the open data reviews onto proprietary reviews services to help hospitality businesses through the transition phase
* Innovate in natural language processing and translation solutions
* Provide software for reviews-based reputation management and tracking of operational improvements
* Innovate in proof-of-purchase / verified-customer technologies
* Provide consultancy services for integrators

## Get in touch

* Website and demo web app: https://mangrove.reviews
* Twitter: @mangroveReviews
* Mastodon: @[e-mail]
* Join the Mangrove chat on Riot https://riot.im/app/#/room/#mangrove:matrix.org
* GitLab: https://gitlab.com/plantingspace/mangrove
* Email: [e-mail]