Among the projects Expedita take part of, we can mention some that, for its dimension and complexity, demonstrate the company skills and potential. In particularly, we call your attention to the ones in the tourism sector, a domain in which Expedita actively participate in several research and business projects, and the ones regarding the maritime transportation, a domain in which there has been a wide coverage.

In the Tourism sector, as a strategic investment for more than 10 years, there has been a continuous research effort in collaboration with Portuguese and international organizations, as it can be seen in the following diagram.

Historical overview

Expedita has been developing technologies and solutions for the Tourism sector in the past 14 years.

Starting with web-based reservation systems for all types of services - including: events, entrance fees, activities, lodging, transport, etc. - for single entities and multi-entity scenarios, the research and development project we have been involved at have evolved to regional promotion and tourism destiny knowledge bases.

Expedita has already developed stable platforms for time-based services promotion and reservation and for tourism-related information management.

Regarding the time-based services management, our reservation platform has was conceived as a result from the knowledge and experience acquired in our participation in the TourIst project, under the EU RISI 2 initiative, between 1998 and 1999. Since then, the developed product  has been applied in more than 10 business projects and is currently under distribution by a network of partners.

This reservation system has several advantages regarding other existing alternatives due to its representation capacities and flexibility, either regarding the type of service provided, the time allocation policy and the commercial strategies defined. For these reasons, it has already been successfully applied in several scenarios, including

• transport companies
• hotel groups
• regional multi-company tourism portals (including lodging and activities)
• hotels in-house activities and restaurant reservation
• time-share inventory management and selling

Within our participation in the ISNOVA project, funded by the INTERREG IIIb program, a new product has been develop for tourism-related knowledge management. This platform has been conceived in order to store in a structured representation all the information that describes the attractions in a tourism destiny, allowing for a interactive and exploratory navigation by potential tourist in multiple independent interfaces.

This knowledge management platform has been applied in the Madeira region where it manages information about events and natural resources. The information is them made available to the tourists and local citizens through two thematic websites and the portal from one regional Internet access provider.

Under the running CIVITAS-MIMOSA project, the knowledge platform is being extended to support itinerary creation and management, providing tourists with the ability to time-schedule the attractions and add comments on what they have seen. The knowledge representation has also been extended in order to provide location-based queries and visualization. This functionality will be made available in normal PC browsers and by mobile devices.