MyHelsinki Open API – places, events and activities

The MyHelsinki Open API is an open interface of three databases maintained by the Travel and Tourism Unit of City of Helsinki. It offers up-to-date information about places, events and activities in and around Helsinki. With this API we hope to increase the usage of open data for both commercial purposes and the city’s development. It can be used by experienced project development teams and new app developers alike.

The MyHelsinki Open API gathers information from three data sources, the data of which can be used in JSON format:

1. Database of places maintained by the City of Helsinki
2. The Linked Events database maintained by the City of Helsinki
3. The content management system of the MyHelsinki service

The database of places incudes data about places and actors in and around Helsinki, such as places of interest, restaurants, shops and hotels. Actors can maintain information about their own places using the https://kaupunkialustana.hel.fi/ilmoituslomake/ website, in addition to which The Travel and Tourism Unit of the City of Helsinki reviews, standardizes and curates the material.

Linked Events offers categorised data about events and places in Helsinki. It serves as the joint database for all departments within the City of Helsinki and the hel.fi online service.

In addition to events added by users themselves, the Linked Events API obtains all event data from the City of Helsinki’s culture venues and Helmet libraries in Helsinki Region. In addition, events are added from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Helsinki City Museum, Helsinki Art Museum and Helsinki City Theatre. The Travel and Tourism Unit also supplies and moderates events organized by others which might be interesting to travelers and inhabitants.

The content management system of the MyHelsinki service is used to obtain activity data for the MyHelsinki Open API. Activities are repeated events targeted at visitors and promoted on the MyHelsinki service, for example. In addition, images and their license terms are obtained from the content management system.

All of the information provided over the API is open data with license Creative Commons BY 4.0, with the exception of image files. When using images, please refer to the license terms included with each image.