Report: Building Data Ecosystems
Building Data Ecosystems to Unlock the Value of Urban (Big) Data: A Good Practices Reference Guide A Good Practices Reference Guide
von Radecki, A., Tcholtchev, N., Lämmel, P. & Schaj, G., 2020.
Cities and city regions worldwide are increasingly harnessing the potential of Smart City solutions, especially those which create and deploy big data to tackle critical societal challenges, address key public policy problems, and enable public, private and third sector stakeholders to provide better delivery of products and services. Their goal is to enact and exploit a technically, socially, economically, and environmentally successful digital transition. At the heart of any high-performing Smart City is a high-performing data ecosystem. However, developing and transitioning to an integrated municipal data infrastructure, where data is widely and easily shared and used, requires sustained effort. Few cities are already in a position to fully harness and embrace the data revolution; most are only now actively working to build their data infrastructures to be fit for purpose.
Through inspiration and trial and error, lessons are starting to be learned. It is clear that architects of Smart Cities need to address at least four fundamental action areas across at least twelve key issues:
• The groundwork and preparation required when starting to organise a data ecosystem (rationale for data plans, stakeholder mapping, data audits)
• The governance, management, ethics, and regulation arrangements necessary to set the basic framework (governance and management, governing for public good: building Smart Cities with and for citizens, governing data ethically)
• The technical infrastructures and challenges which are fundamental for an integrated ecosystem (building Open Data ecosystems and fostering interoperability, investing in data infrastructure: hardware and software, data security, data visualisation)
• Resources, finance and economics questions which need to be asked of data-driven ecosystems (financing models and procurement, cost–benefit analysis).
A wide range of good practices are profiled in this review. These include projects currently being undertaken in Vienna (Open Source Database), Cologne (Big Data Visualisation), Milan (Sharing Cities Urban Sharing Platform), Eindhoven (Smart City Data Platform in Strijp-S), Greater Manchester (Data-Enabled Innovation Challenges), Tallinn/Estonia (X-Road, Data Exchange Platform), Barcelona (Big Data Integration Solution, and Citizen Science and IoT Data Governance Pilot), and Greater Dublin (Dublinked Data Portal).