BATDIV: A Blockchain-based Approach for Tourism Data Insertion and Visualization

In this work, we introduce BATDIV, a Blockchain-based Approach for Tourism Data Insertion and Visualization, focusing mainly on the European Tourism Indicators System (ETIS). Tourism development programs, promoted at both national and international levels, use measurable indicators to monitor and manage the sustainable development of territories. The adoption of blockchain technology (BCT) allows lowering some typical technological barriers encountered when dealing with this kind of data collections, such as data management process, data integrity, time delay for information retrieval, data accessibility, storage costs, data ownership rights management, data centralization, backup procedures management. The BCT natively supports decentralization by sharing and replicating databases to ensure the same standards for data definition, and provides access control, data integrity, and immutability through cryptographic credentials. We developed a demonstrator using BigchainDB, a permissioned blockchain, writing the infrastructure code in JavaScript, both for the back-end and the front-end, to provide data insertion and visualization via a web browser. We finally tested our architecture on a small-scale testbed, deploying multiple BigchainDB nodes, performing throughput measurements, and showing transactions per second variation when increasing the number of validator nodes.