In the new open data strategy, Lisbon City Council plans to launch a new portal that goes beyond simply accessing city data, seeking to facilitate its use in analyses and visualizations that tell stories.
The Lisbon City Council approved, at the end of March, a new open data strategy for the city, replacing and updating the plan that had been in place since 2017. The new strategy provides for "a simple but powerful mission: to help the city of Lisbon extract the value from data to improve transparency, efficiency and innovation at the service of all".
"Data is an important tool to ensure the improvement of the quality of life of all those who seek Lisbon, whether to work, live, study or visit. In recent years, the city of Lisbon has made substantial progress in using data to be more transparent, efficient and innovative. The new plan defines a strategy to evolve towards a new approach to open data, with an emphasis on data analytics.", can be read in the document's executive summary. "This plan also reflects an effort to align with the new rules proposed by the European Commission on data governance, with the aim of better exploiting the potential of the growing volume of data in a reliable European framework."
With the new strategy, you are looking for:
- Strengthen the power of open data in city management: create conditions for data-driven decision making;
- Increase the reach of open data policy to reach a more diverse audience: democratize access to data, allowing its use by a more diverse audience;
- Evolve to an open data strategy with an emphasis on data analytics: add a data analytics and visualization dimension to the data catalog
These three goals will be realized by publishing open data and, where possible, the code used, by developing relevant datasets, by a focus on using data to tell stories, by developing the Lisbon City Council's internal capacity to solve problems with data, and by promoting data analysis and visualization initiatives for the city.
New portal on the way
Lisbon launched its first open data portal in February 2016 and, in the same year, started the elaboration of the first open data plan, which was approved the following year. The Open Lisbon portal was created to "make available information generated by municipal services, in open formats, about the city of Lisbon".. Part of that data was already public but only for consultation; the launch of Lisboa Aberta allowed not only to make that information available for free download and use by anyone, but also to publish more data from the municipality and also data about the city but coming from entities outside the Lisbon Municipality, with private companies.
With a time horizon of 2023-2027, the new strategy foresees the launch of a new portal, branded Smart Lisbon, which Agglutinate the information currently scattered across three sites - Lisboa Aberta, which publishes the datasets, Lisboa Inteligente, which aggregates data-related initiatives, and LxDataLab, which provides challenges for programmers and researchers to do with data. It is intended that the new platform "allow you to work directly on the data provided, access visualizations, create reports, and share data dynamically using publishing APIs"; and that you also have "an area of collaboration and code sharing" that allows not only to engage programmers and data scientists, but to encourage collaboration in sharing open source code based on open data.
The open data plan for 2023-2027 also plans to strengthen the availability of data on the most sought-after topics, Mobility and Environment, and a better survey of the needs of citizens - and, in particular, of the academic and scientific community - regarding the most relevant data and themes to be made available. It is also intended to make a "guide [municipal] services in selection of the data that can be made available, as to their relevance and format"., "to continue to invest in the development of services that allow automatic data update“and yet "promote and support initiatives and projects of national and international scope".
Lisbon's new open data strategy was unanimously approved in the March 29th public meeting of the City Council, through Proposal nº 137/2023, presented by Councilwoman Joana Almeida, responsible for Information Systems.
You can see, below, the current and the previous plan:
Open Data Portal referenced in European report
O Open Lisbonthe open data portal of the municipality of Lisbon, was analyzed in the latest report of the Data.Europa.euthe European Commission's structure for the issue of open data. Lisbon, which makes available more than 360 sets of data, some of them in real time, appears alongside cities such as Berlin, Barcelona or Paris.
The report, entitled Rethinking the Impact of Open Datais the first step in the process of defining the methodology for a pan-european study on the importance of policies to make data available to society. The report, the first in a series of four, presents a review of the existing literature on the impact of open data, focusing on the use of open data portals, intermediaries, and automated tools.
According to Data.Europa.eu, due to the wide availability of open data, evaluations of its impacts are often ill-defined in scope or based on frameworks such as Open Data Maturity (ODM) and the Open Data Barometer (ODB). The European Commission's challenge is to make the most complete evaluation of this impact. In this first report, a number of challenges are raised, including the need to find a common definition of the impact of open data at the European level. Future reports in this series will explore these issues further.
