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Eindhoven wants to become a smart society. But how does that work? What’s going on in a society like that? Are there any good examples to learn from? DataStudio Eindhoven explores the transition a city has to go through to actually become such a smart society. Each week, we present a new contribution on E52. This week: The city is working on an inventory for public data. Read all the articles here.

 

“Incomplete datasets need to be completed and that takes up a lot of time.”Karen Hendriks, gemeente Eindhoven

The municipality of Eindhoven has focused on smart use of data for years. To improve their own organisation and services, but also for others to get involved with it through the open data portal. After an inventory of almost a year the municipality of Eindhoven has collected 530 datasets, which have made clear which datasets are available for publication.

“We have collected all available datasets in a big Excel file. We then simply provided them with a title and description. So now we have a clear file with what datasets we have already collected, whether these are complete or incomplete and which are possibly suitable for publication”, says data steward Karen Hendriks.

Hendriks has been working on the project data inventory and classification since May 1st, 2016. Ever since she started she has been looking for datasets that have been kept track of among employees here and there or that are already in the system. For example, think about the locations of charging stations for electric cars, where waste bins are located, but also financial data. The municipality wants to provide as many datasets as possible through the portal of the municipality of Eindhoven, so that they can also be used by other parties.

 

Now that the inventory phase has been completed, the municipality wants to publish new data regularly. It’s hard to say how often that will be. “Incomplete datasets need to be completed and that takes up a lot of time. Besides, there are many datasets that hold confidential information and personal data. We can’t just publish these. In the future we are going to see whether we can bend data in a way that we can publish it without the personal information.”

Through the data portal, the municipality hopes to make data more appealing for the citizens. “We will have to work together with journalists to tell a story with data. That way we can involve the citizens  more with the collected data of their city”, says Gaby Rasters, strategic adviser of the municipality of Eindhoven.

The new data portal is being used since February. The dataset DICE was recently placed on the open data portal, which shows which data will be published next.