TEN Project Proposal

PROJECT DETAILS

PROJECT POSTER

PROJECT APPLICATION

REPORT

Problem and Motivation

The tourism is a big source of revenue for Singapore, with the total contribution of the Travel and Tourism industry making up 10.1% of the country’s GDP in year 2014. It is therefore crucial for those in the country to understand how the tourism industry is performing, as well as the effectiveness of various events in stimulating the tourism industry in the country, in order to improve the industry performance.

However, available information about the industry performance is often represented in the format of data tables in the worst case, or simple line, bar or pie charts in the best of cases. These methods of visualization are often insufficient to accurately represent the complex nature of the industry, and thus provides limited utility to readers.

Our group therefore intends to use various visualization methods such as high-dimensional visualization methods like tree or heat maps and time-series visualization methods like cycle plots to visualize and express important information and trends about the industry to readers. These information could be used to show the effectiveness of various strategies to boost tourism like the F1 Race, as well as to explain trends like the drop in tourism in year 2015.

Related Works

The team has looked into some visualisations that was created on the Singapore’s tourism sectors, which gave us ideas on the factors or areas that the team can also looked into. The visualisations also provided us with an understanding of the tourism industry over the years and the different visualisation techniques.

Knoema

Knoema provides access to a large number of databases and visualisations tools for those databases to the public. From the visualisation of Singapore’s tourism from Knoema, the team has identified some factors which can be looked into such as the Government’s spending on tourism. However the team finds that the visualisations could be done better if it can present how the various factors are correlated, as currently the various factors are independent. Hence, the team will be taking this into consideration when designing our visualisations.

Public Tableau

The Tableau visualisation looks at the Singapore’s tourism industry from various aspects up to year 2013. Unlike the visualisations from Knoema, the Tableua visualisation further looks into the happenings in Singapore such as the opening of RWS which is closely related to the tourism industry and also the revenue and occupancy of the hotel industry which could be affected by the number of tourists. It also supported the observed trends with reasons which explains the drop or increase in tourist arrivals, which provided us with an overview of the tourism industry between 2009 to 2013. With this, our team has also identified areas which we can look into such as the hotel industry which is closely related to tourism.

ISSS608 Group 9

While researching, the team realised that Group 9 [1] of 2015/16 T1 of ISSS608 has also worked on Singapore’s tourism industry for their project. Thus, the team has looked into the visualisation techniques that was used and the factors and areas that they have considered for their project. The ISSS608 team has visualised the visitors’ data using a sunburst diagram which allows for further drilling down by continent, by country and by mode of transport which we find that it is an interesting way of visualising the data. Furthermore, the references provided has also provided us with more sources for data.

References

Related Works

1. Visualisation on Singapore’s Tourism Industry by Knoema
2. Visualisation on Singapore’s Tourism Industry by Public Tableau
3. Visualisation on Singapore’s Tourism Industry by Group 9 of 2015/16 T1 ISSS608 Visual Analytics and Applications [2]

Data sources

1. CEIC: Data on Visitor arrivals, Revenue and Expenditure
2. Singapore Tourism Board (STB): Data on Hotel statistics and Tourism sector performance

Key Challenges

Hidden patterns & Visualisation

We want to find out if there are hidden patterns, and special characteristics of the recent trend of tourists, for example, seasonal patterns and yearly patterns. We also want to find out if there is a correlations between different variables, for example the correlation between tourists' revenue and tourists' arrivals. The challenge here is to find out hidden patterns or correlations that bring people more insights other than just trivial knowledge, and to use appropriate tools and graphs to visualise these patterns and correlations.

Investments in tourism

We want to know whether the current policy suits the real situation in tourism, and whether the media tells a true story of tourism in Singapore. For example, is it true that F1 draws in more tourists? The key challenge here is to understand and analyse the data and validate those policies and news regarding tourism in Singapore.

D3.js

As everyone in the group is new to D3.js, it is a huge obstacle for all of us to overcome and coming up with creative visualisations for the project.

Milestones