The Helsinki Region Infoshare Project

Opening the data reserves of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area

Text Petja Partanen

The three-member ‘strike force’ of the Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI) project has a clear mission: to make the opening of data part of the daily work of municipal staff.

Hami Kekkonen‘s inbox is teeming with raw data, as usual. The latest message contains the income and expenditure data of the City of Espoo in 2011–2012. One can find the revenue and expenditure of the city’s departments, utilities and other units, according to the financial statements.

In no time, the financial data is shared over the web and available to anyone. The metadata of the new public data source is added to www.hri.fi catalogue’s database. The financial data of Espoo receives the number 1,008 in the data catalogue. Yet another fragment of information is taken from within the walls of a city department and put out into the open for all to see.

”The purpose is to make the opening of public data part of the daily activities in the cities of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area”, says Project Manager Ville Meloni.

“It is the most important goal of the year”, Tanja Lahti continues.

Ville Meloni asks Hami Kekkonen exchange a few words about an upcoming data release.

The 1,000th dataset to be published in the HRI service is a special one: a collection of high-resolution aerial photos of Second World War-era Helsinki.

“I took a look at the dataset. The file size is still slightly too big”, tells Kekkonen.

The historical aerial photo collection has been modified by geodata entrepreneur Pekka Sarkola as voluntary work in the spirit of open data.

This is the daily work of the HRI team. They search for public data sources around the metropolitan area and encourage the city departments and other offices to make their data treasures available for all over the web.

”It is nice to see how the public awareness of open data has grown”, says Tanja Lahti. Lahti is especially pleased that there are already 1000 data sets available in the HRI web service.”I majored in Regional Science so I love maps. It is fascinating to make them public.”

Changing the Culture

In early 2009, there was not yet much discussion about open data in Finland, but Asta Manninen, Director of the City of Helsinki Urban Facts, was prescient. She had seen how the geodata and the population projections of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area lay scattered among dozens of data repositories. In her Vision for Regional Data she drafted a proposal for the Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI) project which would gather all this data into one service where it would be accessible openly and free of charge for anyone who needs it.

Today, the HRI data catalogue has over 1,000 datasets. Nonetheless, the journey is only at the beginning. HRI’s Project Manager Ville Meloni points out that the opening of public data brings about a significant cultural change. A big task for the HRI team is to convince the municipal officials that raw data is actually valuable.

”The expertise of Urban Facts consists primarily of the ability to refine mixed-bag original data into good-quality statistics that can be published. What HRI does now, together with Urban Facts, is tell people to also publish their raw data in a machine-readable form and let others to do their own analysis of the material”, says Meloni.

”Helsinki alone has some thousand individual data systems”, he reveals. In one of the workshops organized by HRI, the aim was to create a tool for people who are unlocking data – a common database of the data contained in the various data repositories in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. “We seek to create a view to all the information the cities possess. This would be a great thing to have for all the officials and citizens to see.”

Unlocking Vantaa’s library data

Hami Kekkonen has spent the morning as a guest of the Vantaa City Library. There she had the opportunity to talk to a doctoral researcher from the University of Helsinki who had demonstrated the possible uses of library loan statistics as raw data.

”He had prepared a variety of visualisations. You could see, for instance, what sort of books are borrowed in different libraries around the metropolitan area and where the customers of a particular library come from”, says Kekkonen.

The library staff had been very interested. ”They felt the data should be opened. It is easy to obtain the lending data from the new lending system that the libraries will soon adopt”.

Libraries have been the forerunners of open data. The collection data of the public libraries have already been accessible through an interface for some time.

Today, a mobile application using the interface allows you to borrow a library book directly from a friend without actually visiting the library. It remains to be seen what applications can be built on the lending data that will be unlocked in the future.

As the clock strikes four, Tanja Lahti heads home; Ville Meloni continues to finalise the preliminary material for the participants of an open data workshop; and Hami Kekkonen stays in to answer emails. She has helped the City of Vantaa to establish an open data catalogue in the city’s web server, allowing the departments to share their datasets. One of the sets published in the catalogue consists of the city’s population data since 1890.

Before they depart, the team discusses what kind of applications could be created from the aerial photos of the city. They agree that applications making use of data are the best incentive for those who possess data resources suitable for opening.

On the following week, Deputy Mayor of Helsinki Pekka Sauri tweets: “Here is another amazing data opening. #helsinki 1943. Wartime aerial photo material is now available via Helsinki’s open data service.”

After the release of the aerial photos, an independent developer has created a web application which can be used to compare the historical aerial photos to present-day Helsinki. The transformation of the city has been dramatic. The coastal line, for example, has radically changed its shape.

 

Helsinki Region Infoshare brings together producers and users of public data

 

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The texts of the publication are licensed under the 'HRI-nimeä' attribution. All reuse of the material must be accompanied by the name of the author (Petja Partanen or Terhi Upola) and the publisher (Helsinki Region Infoshare).