The second meeting of the Kansai Tourism Informatics Research Group 2025, jointly organized by the Kyoto College of Informatics (KCGI) and the Japan Society of Tourism Information Science, was held on February 1, 2026 at KCGI Kyoto Ekimae Satellite, where students, graduates, and faculty members in the KCGI Tourism IT specialization presented their research.In addition to conference members from various parts of Kansai and Tokyo, many students from KCGI and Kyoto Computer Gakuin (KCG) also participated.The lively exchange of ideas and opinions provided an opportunity for students to learn and exchange ideas that will be useful for their future research and studies.
In the workshop, Professor Manabu Ohta of the Faculty of Environment, Life and Natural Science, Okayama University, gave an invited lecture on "Sightseeing Recommendation Using Reputation Information Analysis with Large-scale Language Models", covering sightseeing spot recommendation and sightseeing route recommendation based on the viewpoints that travelers value.Mr. Jiang Ning, President of Nichia International Consulting Corporation, who managed the Chinese Pavilion at the Osaka-Kansai Expo, gave a multifaceted presentation titled "Management of the Chinese Pavilion at the Osaka-Kansai Expo," in which he presented the Chinese Pavilion at the cultural crossroads of the Expo as both a piece of architecture and a story.KCGI students, alumni, and faculty members who study tourism also presented the results of their daily research.
The study group aims to improve the attractiveness of tourist attractions and decentralize tourists through the collection and analysis of dynamic tourist data, the digitization of tourist resources, and the realization of smart cities, and to implement and deploy them in the real world by utilizing the framework of industry-government-academia collaboration.KCGI has established "Tourism IT" as one of the specialized fields, where students learn to create new tourism services and tourism business models by applying ICT.The preparation for this workshop was led by faculty members in the field of tourism IT specialties.
