Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI) is an open data service of the cities of Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen. The service provides data on the cities of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area and the entire region, free of charge and available to everyone.

“Opening up public data creates new services and business opportunities and boosts research and development. The value of data increases as it is used.”

The service offers statistics and long time series on the population, economy and well-being of the Helsinki region, a wide range of geospatial data and interfaces that are popular with application developers, even providing real-time data. The data can be freely downloaded and used in any way, for example for research and development, decision making, visualisations, application development or data journalism. Open data has already been used in a variety of ways. You can find examples of use in the HRI app gallery.

Objectives

The public data resources of the capital region’s cities are published as open data and made available to all. The data are easily accessible on the HRI web service and can be downloaded and used free of charge. The web service will also encourage data producers and users to interact more closely with each other. Information on the operating model and best practices of the service are shared freely for others to use.

Finance and administration

The HRI service is funded by the cities of Espoo, Helsinki, Vantaa and Kauniainen. In addition, the first years of HRI were supported by Sitra, the Finnish independence celebration fund, and the Ministry of Finance with a grant for municipal cooperation.

The HRI service is managed, supervised and implemented by management and steering groups in accordance with the main contract and the financing agreement. The steering group includes the service’s funders, the implementers, the City of Helsinki Executive Office and Forum Virium Helsinki. The operational coordination of the HRI is the responsibility of the City of Helsinki Executive Office. Data managers, IT experts, communication experts and lawyers from Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen are also involved in the implementation of the HRI service.

Forum Virium Helsinki has been a key partner of the HRI service from the very beginning. Forum Virium is a limited company belonging to the Helsinki City Group. It develops new digital services together with companies, the city, other public actors and citizens. During the HRI project phase from 2010-2013, Forum Virium was responsible for project planning and coordination of HRI.