Open Data and Smart City KPIs
There are many initiatives to measure the “smartness” of cities and a jungle of smart city indexes that establish annual city comparisons. Open data can help fulfill the transparency gap in this field.
Sustainability, prosperity or democracy are three of the main challenges of today’s societies. Societies that are, essentially, urban, therefore making the study of urban data one of the most promising fields of progress nowadays. Of course, many of the answers to the challenges above can be found in cities. After many decades of mistrust, today most policy makers know that cities are great problem-solving tools. In fact, with near 60% of the world population inhabiting urban soil, there is little hope for the general progress of mankind outside the three pillars of sustainable, participatory and prosperous urban development.
A fourth element, innovation, adds to the former three to stand for the aforementioned process of problem-solving cycle in which cities are embarked. Those four elements form the core of Horizon 2020 program, the flagship of the current European policies in advancing towards smarter cities.
Horizon 2020 defines vertical and horizontal actions. Amongst the latter, the CityKeys projectaims to help cities across Europe to measure sustainability, prosperity, democracy and innovation. For that, a new common reference framework must be created, a common framework whose need increases proportionally to the number of different smart city rankings, smart city definitions and smart city projects launched by the EU, each of it working again and again on its own set of indicators.
CityKeys not only represents one of the most serious attempts to collect Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) about smart cities so far, but also intends to provide a baseline for international recommendations on the subject and an additional tool for project decision making within cities. Besides from heavily relying on open data to achieve the former goals, open data inside the Citykeys project is relevant in various ways:
After having reached the first half of the project, there are a significant number of outcomes that directly impact open data. First, the analysis of the source data of the five pilot cities (Vienna, Rotterdam, Tampere, Zagreb and Zaragoza), only an average of 15% of them can be considered as open data (with different accessibility and quality levels). This figure is clearly modest. It does not mean that the cities have an 85% of public “dark” data. It probably means that the data relevant for decision making support is still relatively little affected by open data efforts.
Second, open data is better maintained and updated when it is needed for operational purposes.
