Open regions and cities data on the European Data Portal

Open regions and cities data

The European Data Portal (EDP) is an initiative by the European Commission that aims to increase the impact of open data by making data easy to find and re-use for everyone. The portal harvests metadata from EU Member States and enables users to discover the data they need by making its metadata searchable in all the EU supported languages. In addition to making the data searchable, the EDP also provides thirteen data catalogues to aid users in finding the data they need, one of which is regions and cities. These datasets include, for instance, land registries, state maps, and the location of post offices.

The EDP offers 55,750 datasets related to regions and cities. For example:

• "Visit rate of tourist destinations" that states how many tourists are visiting the Olomouc region in the Czech Republic from the Czech National Open Data Portal.
• "Constituencies Stavanger municipality", which shows the current constituency boundaries in Stavanger, Norway, from data.norge.no.
• "Population by municipality - Population per municipality" that lists the respective number of adults and minors by sex for each municipality from the Portail Open Data in Luxembourg.

These datasets are accessible on the EDP and were harvested from the national open data portals across Europe.

Open Data uses cases in regions and cities

The EDP has forty-four examples of uses cases that use open data on regions and cities. For example, the platform Golemio and Helsinki Region Infoshare.

Golemio is a platform from the Czech Republic that is developed and maintained by Operátor ICT. The platform shares datasets from Operátor ICT that can help a person living or visiting Prague infinding parking spaces or accessing information about public transportation. The platform also serves as a space for experts to find datasets that they can analyse and process to gain additional insights or create websites, applications or prediction models for the city.

Helsinki Region Infoshare is an open data service that helps people find urban data in Helsinki and in the neighbouring cities Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen. The service provides open data catalogues with informative articles on data use and events in Finland, and offers support on how to exploit, share and re-use open data. Several stakeholders in Helsinki are utilising their database to organise and promote public events in Helsinki and to deliver urban data to provide value for the region.

For more information about Golemio and Helsinki Region Infoshare listen to the EDP's webinar "Open data in Smart Cities" or read our feature highlight on the webinar.

For more examples on open data, look at the EDP's datasets and use cases from different European countries. If you know of any open data use cases, share them with us via mail, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to stay up to date!