Opening Public Sector Information (PSI) is not only a goal in its own right, but a key initiative towards enabling new and improved services to the general public. Open Data thus paves the way to wider benefits for society, including but not limited to more efficient transport, increased transparency, and new economic activities for Luxembourg. Open Data then is pivotal in the transformation of Luxembourg into a Smart Nation, where individuals, private and public sector organisations can freely use and share information.
By Jeff Konnen, on behalf of Digital Lëtzebuerg
When we started with the Open Data project, we quickly identified key domains where access to data was lacking and where we could make a significant contribution.
A review of more established Open Data initiatives in other countries identified mobility as one of the key Open Data domains (see also The Open Knowledge Foundation Key Datasets Index http://index.okfn.org/dataset ). This is also the case here in Luxembourg, especially given the intermodal and international commuting traffic, and associated fragmented information crossing several providers, regions and countries.
We thus decided to focus on smart mobility for the "Game of Code" hackathon challenge. Thanks to commitment of the minister for sustainable development to open data, we managed to get agreements from the VerkeiersVerbond to open up several key public transport datasets, including the transport network, timetables as well as live data concerning bus departures and delays. We are also opening up fundamental public datasets enabling mobile location based services, location information such as address data, demography and work statistics and many more.
Our approach towards opening up data and engaging with the reuse community aims to stimulate the creation of innovative solutions in that particular domain and engage as early as possible with data users, especially interested startups that want to build new products and businesses on top of these newly opened datasets. Examples of startups ecosystems relying on Open Data business models can already be found in other countries, one prominent example being CityMapper, a UK based startup providing a mobile app helping people travel using public transport in cities that have opened up their transport data (valued around 250$ million).
Opening Public Sector Information (PSI) is not only a goal in its own right, but a key initiative towards enabling new and improved services to the general public. Open Data thus paves the way to wider benefits for society, including but not limited to more efficient transport, increased transparency, and new economic activities for Luxembourg. Open Data then is pivotal in the transformation of Luxembourg into a Smart Nation, where individuals, private and public sector organisations can freely use and share information.
Lastly, one perhaps unexpected but significant benefit will be that Open Data will also facilitate data sharing and reuse between public administrations, streamlining processes between administrations and avoiding the creation of multiple occurrences of the same data, in concordance with the "once only principle".