Kick-off in St. Gallen
The beautiful city St. Gallen, located near the Lake Constance in Switzerland,
was the charming host place of the first Aladdin PMB meeting, the project
kick-off.
On the 20th and 21st September 2005 Aladdin partners from six European
countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK, Sweden and Hungary) followed the
invitation of the project coordinator ISO Software Systeme to get to know each
other and to elaborate together the Aladdin project roadmap for the next two
years of project duration.
Within the two days of meeting at the premises of the University of St. Gallen
the consortium members were introduced in each workpackage, its tasks and
deliverables by the workpackage leaders and started in several workshops
already working on different tasks regarding the business process analysis and
technical aspects.
In the technical workshop the partners ISO, YellowMap and Language Technology
Centre came together to draw a rough technical landscape of the Aladdin system,
and aspects like mobile devices, the technical framework, interfaces and
architecture were discussed in greater detail.
The research workshop on the other hand dealt with the clarification of the
next business analysis steps and each research partner was assigned to an user
organisation for the joint elaboration of business use cases. By doing so, the
consortium tries to consider different models of incoming tourism and will
include the different incoming travel experiences from the user partners also
into the analysis.
In spite of the tight schedule of the agenda the partners could enjoy in the
evening of the first day a city tour through St. Gallen, organised by the
hosting partner "the Institute of Public Services and Tourism" (Institut für
öffentliche Dienstleistungen & Tourismus) of St. Gallen and discovered the
regional cuisine in one of the typical restaurants of the city.
One day before the kick-off, on the 19th September, a come-together event took
place at the Falkenburg restaurant in St. Gallen. This event not covered by
the agenda was held under the proposition to bring all partners in an informal
atmosphere together and to establish first contacts and interchanges before
the official meeting started.
The EU funded project Aladdin that aims to develop a mobile destination
management system for incoming agencies is composed of four universities,
three small-to-medium sized technological companies and three user
organisations that are willing to assure the success of the Aladdin system
beyond the co-operative research project.