City of Namur creates data marketaplce to improve public efficiency and engagement with citizens

The team at Namur has been collecting and using geographic information systems (GIS) data for over 30 years. We therefore have considerable expertise in data enhancement, and we wanted to extend our approach by giving as many people as possible access to its wider data.

The city of Namur’s objective is to facilitate access to our data for all, enabling employees, residents and local stakeholders to be better informed. Internally, sharing data helps to increase efficiency and make better, data-driven decisions.

Namur was the first city in Wallonia to create a data platform in 2018. On launch, our portal contained 50 datasets and multiple maps and dashboards to provide more detailed analysis of the available data. This was essential to ensure that our data could be properly understood by all types of audience: citizens, partners, businesses, the media and researchers.

The Namur data marketplace is also aimed at the city’s employees and elected representatives. Specific access rights have been put in place to enable them to view specific sections of the portal that contain private data, or information that is not yet shared through open data. Our teams have also worked hard to ensure smooth, intuitive navigation on the marketplace:

• A home page with key figures, resources, news and popular data,
• Thematic categories to enable browsing of datasets, such as mobility, urban planning, culture, sport, health, energy and finance,
• A drop-down menu highlighting the categories of data produced, as well as a page featuring all the portal’s data visualizations.
• Tools for creating data visualizations and maps, and for reusing data on a large scale via APIs.
• Controlled access to all private datasets, visible only to employees and elected representatives.

Namur’s data marketplace features a range of high value-added datasets (such as its municipal address database, and historic photos) as well as thematic pages. Several categories of data are available:

• The demography observatory gives access to information such as household composition, population age, population movements, and civil status. The dashboard lets users filter data from the municipal level down to a more granular picture of each of Namur’s 46 neighborhoods.

• The mobility open data observatory for access to data on parking, parking lots and cycling facilities. This dashboard is connected to a number of tools for automatic data updates, guaranteeing data quality.

• The land observatory, which contains dashboards dedicated to providing information on all private land in the city as well as one covering the area’s cemeteries, with access to relevant information related to the locations of graves. Photos enhance the data to provide complete analysis.

In order to be able to share data internally, we have chosen to implement a finely-tuned user access management system. More than 170 employees have specific rights around which internal datasets they can access.

• The internal mobility dashboard brings together data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, such as the number of pedestrians and cars or temperatures. This is only used internally as the data sources are very varied, and it is necessary to guarantee their accuracy and reliability before publishing them as open data.
• The property tax dashboard identifies the financial value of each plot of land in Namur, enabling the municipality to calculate property tax amounts and predict future revenues.
• A dashboard to encourage the rental of empty buildings within the city. By mapping buildings which are undergoing work or are unoccupied, employees can identify the proportion of empty units and encourage owners to put them to use.
• An inventory of all data-related errors, listing the problems to be corrected. Simplified access to this “to-do list” enables continuous improvement of data quality and reliability.
• The municipal personnel management dashboard. Still at the pilot stage, this will provide department heads and the 50 heads of services with daily monitoring of all aspects of personnel management, including sta arrival and departure times, leave, and absenteeism.

Thanks to the implementation of these initial dashboards, employees are seeing the benefits of this approach and are now demanding new, data-driven services.

We also share some of our data securely with external partners:

• Bike path development data: information around planned new bike paths has been shared with relevant organizations, enabling them to prepare accordingly .
• On-demand data: when data is too confidential to be shared as open data, it is shared if requested by specific partners, most notably for information on land ownership.

Teams at the city of Namur had already been using GIS tools for several decades. However, the adoption of Huwise was essential to enable us to rapidly publish our data in relevant formats and to different stakeholders.

The deployment of the city of Namur’s data marketplace has been very well received, and has delivered multiple benefits:

• Greater transparency for citizens: as they can now obtain information on a wide range of subjects and access services more easily. Our open data approach helps engage and attract residents.
• Improved efficiency for administrative staff: the creation of datasets and dashboards following requests from business units enables a better flow of information. Employees can thus save time on their day-to-day tasks and be more efficient.
• Create opportunities for innovation by partners and other stakeholders: secure access to local data enables other external players to gain a better understanding of the area and its development potential. It provides an invaluable source of information for predicting the progress of their projects and seizing new opportunities.