By Johanna Lemola

Helsinki Region Infoshare is a pioneering project in Finland to open public-sector data for free use. Citizens benefit from new services.

What did Helsinki look like from the air in 1943? How about in subsequent decades? Few people have known so far. Helsinki has been regularly photographed from the air over the decades, but the photos have mainly remained buried in the archives for use by only a few public servants.

Now aerial photos of Helsinki from 1943 onwards have been made public by Helsinki Region Infoshare, HRI for short. HRI is a project to open data from the databases of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area cities and other public-sector sources and to make the data freely available for everybody through the project’s online service at www.hri.fi.

Very soon after the aerial photos were published, application developers came up with visualizations of the city’s evolution.

The aerial photos were the 1,000th dataset opened by HRI.

Raw data for new digital services

Ville Meloni supervises HRI as project manager. He explains the philosophy of opening public-sector data and making the data available free of charge for everybody, from private citizens to individual application developers to businesses.

“The public sector produces vast amounts of data for its own use. This data, produced with taxpayer money, could and should be used for very many different purposes. It should be used to create new digital services for citizens, to generate new business activity, and to bring benefits for education and research.

“But the public sector doesn’t have to produce all new services by itself. In fact, the results will be much better if many more actors are involved. However, the data shouldn’t be sold, because the overall benefit is much greater if the data is made available free of charge.”

The app leading the blind

BlindSquare helps the blind and visually impaired to navigate through the city by literally telling them where to go. The app determines the user’s location and looks up information about the surroundings from OpenStreetMap, Foursquare and local open public data. It speaks out the information in a synthetic voice on the mobile phone.

Parkman reminds car owners of the location of their cars, tells them the parking charge and allows them to pay the charge on their mobile phones. The application utilizes a Metropolitan parking map database and the GPS location information system.

The City of Helsinki Building Register has opened the data on 80,000 building units in Helsinki. This data can be utilized, for example, by renovation firms to locate various renovation needs in the Helsinki building stock and to create new business.

Finland’s National Land Survey opened map data in 2012. The production company working on a movie on Finland’s only aircraft hijacking utilized the data to produce renderings of the terrain for the outdoor scenes.

Mountains of data awaiting to be mined

Only the imagination sets the limits for what could be unearthed from the mountains of data produced by public administration.

“The City of Helsinki alone has about 1,000 data systems,” Meloni says, “and so far we have only opened a small fraction of all the data.” HRI lists more than 50 applications developed from the data.

The work of opening public-sector data was initiated in 2009 by the City of Helsinki Urban Facts (the city agency that collects, analyzes and reports on data), and the project was joined by the Helsinki Metropolitan Area cities of Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen. HRI was established in 2010 to carry out the project in cooperation with Forum Virium Helsinki, a non-profit company that develops new digital services for citizens with public-sector organizations and private-sector companies.

HRI is coming to the end of the project phase. From the beginning of 2014, the work will be coordinated by Urban Facts, signifying the beginning of an era when open data is part of normal city operations.

Meloni envisions the future: “All public-sector data should be seen strategically. Open data should be a routine in public-sector organizations.”

He sees Helsinki moving in the right direction. “Helsinki is the pioneer in open data in Finland and well on its way to achieve the vision.”

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European innovation prize used to advance the democratic process in Helsinki

The City of Helsinki adopted an open data policy in May 2010.

Three years later in June 2013, Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI) received a major recognition for achievements in promoting transparency in public administration through open data: the European Commission awarded HRI with the European Prize for Innovation in Public Administration. The prize was 100,000 euro.

The prize sum will go to further development of Open Ahjo, a project to allow public access to the City of Helsinki electronic decision-making system Ahjo. The system comprises all documents related to the decision-making processes of the Helsinki City Council, the City Board and other City boards and committees. The Ahjo content is produced by about 5,000 Helsinki City officers and elected officials.

Since March 2013, Open Ahjo has made Ahjo’s documents and all of their attachments available from one source in a machine-readable format in real time.

“The prize sum will be used to improve the compatibility of the Ahjo data with other City data including financial, location and statistical information,” says Asta Manninen, Director of City of Helsinki Urban Facts, referring to a major standardization process underway in the City administration to make Open Ahjo serve citizens in the best possible ways.

Manninen, one of the creators of the HRI open data initiative, received the European Prize for Innovation in Public Administration together with HRI Project Manager Ville Meloni.

Open Ahjo is a unique project by international standards judged by its level of transparency. It is one of the largest single factors advancing the democratic process in the Helsinki City administration.

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