The City of Bruges sought a digital collaborator to oversee the Tourism Data Management System (TDMS). With the assistance of Cronos Public Services, they approached them for help to optimize and transforme it into a user-friendly tool for a diverse range of users. TDMS serves as the central platform for managing all events, accommodation facilities, and tourism partnerships within the city.

Challenge

When collaborating with a city, it is imperative to consider the diverse needs of all stakeholders. Each stakeholder possesses unique requirements and employs the tool in slightly different ways. Therefore, creating an application that accommodates all these needs is quite the challenge. To achieve this, they conducted a thorough analysis, gathering input from each user type and documenting it in a comprehensive functional analysis document. 

What did they have to taken into account?

1. A robust system capable of efficiently processing large volumes of data.
2. Provision of an API facilitating seamless integration into various applications, such as the website or CRM system.
3. Implementation of a customized version control system
4. Integration of a fast and logical search engine
5. Development of a user-friendly query system

Approach

Based on the requirements they opted for Laravel Nova. Nova stands out as a code-driven admin panel featuring a Vue front-end, offering developers the ability to swiftly implement various standard functionalities. To ensure the speed of the system and the search engine, they integrated an Elastic Search. Elastic Search is a powerful document-based database that allows us to quickly perform complex searches in a large amount of data. This enhances the overall performance and responsiveness of the application.

Result

For this project, they seamlessly integrated the APIs of UiTdatabank and Toerisme Vlaanderen. Through these integrations, the most up-to-date events and accommodations, sourced directly from the Flemish government, are automatically imported into the system on a daily basis. This automation ensures that Visit Bruges staff have timely access to the latest information, allowing them to efficiently process and publish content on the website.