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Andorra DataHub: How Big Data is transforming a country

Business talk | English

Theatre 16: Track 4

Thursday - 16.10 to 16.50 - Business

During the last century the economy in Andorra has been mainly driven by the services industry, with emphasis on commerce, tourism and financial activities. The modernization and economic diversification of the country have been a priority in recent years, being the technological and digital transformations of these more traditional sectors one of the main goals to make them more competitive and innovative. The scale of Andorra, as a microstate, can be problematic when it comes to resources (development, research, economics, etc.), but at the same time it offers many practical advantages: proximity to stakeholders, flexible legislation, agility when creating and implementing solutions, data availability and accessibility, etc.

In this context, a key niche was identified to improve the competencies of Andorra: The creation of the Andorra DataHub, the national platform to centralize data generated around the country by different public and private entities. This platform disposes a single and unique view of the country, provides an advanced analytical environment, fosters innovative tools to improve and optimize decision making by stakeholders and creates a technological environment for collaboration between public administration, private companies and researchers.

Together with ClearPeaks we analyzed technological alternatives for the implementation and the deployment of the DataHub. We considered various technologies, architectures and deployment models. We have created a platform based on Cloudera that runs on a private Cloud provided by Andorra Telecom. In this talk we will discuss two successful use cases enabled by the DataHub.

The first use case deals with tourism, one of the most important sectors for the Andorran economy representing around 46% of the country’s GDP. Understanding tourists and their behavior is mandatory to fulfill their needs and to optimize decision making with regard to daily operations and strategic plans such setting new countries markets, targeted digital marketing, etc. Traditionally, tourism behavior analysis used conventional methods for information gathering such as surveys. However, these consider assumptions, hypothesis and perceptions that yield dubious information quality. A proper mechanism to perform tourism behavior analysis is therefore critical. With DataHub we created an accurate and automatic solution to leverage massive and diverse data that was already produced by Andorra Telecom. A real time pipeline has been developed to ingest and process Call Detail Record (CDR) data, enabling to transparently analyse by time, space and nationality different KPIs such as number of visitors, duration of the stay in the country, loyalty rate, purpose of the visit, visited places, frequent trajectories, spatial clusters, etc. The new solution optimizes public resources by providing daily usage tools to analyze these KPIs.

The second use case deals with natural hazards. Currently, episodes of extreme climatic and meteorological conditions are increasing and specifically episodes of flash floods are happening frequently in Andorra. Detecting this type of episodes is of a great importance for civil protection and to speed up the activation of the emergency plans and the rescue teams towards the affected areas. However, detection remains complex if we stick to a single data source and therefore it is very important to have real time data from multiple data sources as well as a good alerting system. We have created a pipeline to ingest data coming from different data sources: river flow sensors, weather stations, satellite imagery and depth snow sensors to estimate the volume of water accumulated in certain areas of the country.

These different sources of information, gathered and integrated, are used to provide real time analytical tools for viewing and monitoring hydrology, meteorology and snow data for an early warning system for civil protection and the rescue teams.

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