Big Data projects are always challenging: you need to decide how to define the exact scope, how to measure the results, how to ultimately make it work in a user-friendly way among many other things. Xomnia proved to be a very approachable and knowledgeable partner, was not afraid to take risks, and was willing to continue to learn themselves as well! Thanks to Xomnia, ICCA now delivers an improved service to its members, and we have a few more projects in the pipeline.
Marco van Itterzon, Director Research, ICCA
The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) represents the world’s leading suppliers in handling, transporting and accommodating international meetings and events, and comprises over 1,000 member companies and organisations in almost 100 countries worldwide. Their mission is to create competitive advantages and business opportunities for their members.
When preparing a successful bid to host the next edition of an association’s international meeting, it is crucial that you involve local association representatives. The challenge for ICCA was: how can we help our members to identify leading academic contacts in specified cities and regions, related to a specific meeting in the ICCA Association Database or a specific meeting subject? Big Data came to the rescue in the shape of Xomnia.
The end result, ICCA’s Big Data Explorer, increases the value of membership for their members by presenting a new way of applying data science techniques to the international association meetings market. It is an important step for ICCA in harnessing the power of Big Data and combining it with their unique data on associations and their meetings. In order to search through the Big Data set of conferences, papers, authors, affiliations and, taxonomies, Xomnia utilised the power of the (Google) Cloud. For example, with Big Data tools such as BigQuery and Kubernetes, the data can be searched in a (near) real-time and scalable manner.