Use cases

Giess den Kiez (Pour the Neighborhood) is a Berlin-centred platform that aims to tackle the issue of arid and hot summers causing trees to dry and suffer long-term damage by encouraging citizens to adopt a tree and water it. The project is a coordinated effort to irrigate urban areas and enable citizen participation. On a map overview, dots represent trees, and a color-coding scheme indicates their water requirements.

Surviving in Brussels is a website for the homeless and people who need access to services such as medical aid, shelter, job postings, legal help or financial advice. The website also provides basic information, including shower and bathroom locations, places to eat or drink and emergency information. This information is provided through the website and is shown on smart billboards throughout the city.

MeteoStats is a product of the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology and contains data from as early as 1880 onwards. An example of a MeteoStats initiative is MeteoSwiss, a service that provides visualisation of various types of weather and climate data. The website shows historical trends for measures like temperature and the various types of precipitation.

Oparl is a website interface that offers access to the parliamentary information systems in Germany and is useful for citizens, municipalities, developers and RIS manufacturers. The project aims to create a standard API that allows access to public data currently stored in municipal council information systems thereby promoting the openness of parliamentary systems and public data of the German council.

The Estonian Heatmap shows an overview of various economic and financial trends in terms of average wage, capacity utilisation, core inflation, economic sentiment, employment rate, unemployment rate, vacancies and demand limiting in construction, industry, or services. The map and the source data presents statistics from 2005 onwards.

Sag’s Wien (Say it Vienna) is an application developed for citizens to report on problems, including potholes, road damage, traffic lights malfunctions, waste or pollution, throughout the city directly to the city administration. This enables a dialogue between the public and the government and makes the city more mobile, personal and connected.

iSofMap is a website that visualises cadastral and spatial information and provides access to real estate data of the municipality of Sofia. The website also offers the possibility to contact various real estate services directly to make inquiries.

The election calculator is a tool designed to help citizens compare their personal political views to those of political parties and individuals (e.g. legislators or election candidates) to see how well they align, and subsequently, to help cast their vote. The tool consists of two parts: A voting inventory that compares citizens’ answers with real votes in the legislature from a previous election; and An opinion test which matches citizens’ answers to the answers provided by the political parties or candidates.

Haridussilm, i.e., the Estonian Education Statistics Portal, provides data of primary, general, secondary, vocational and higher education, and monitors various indicators such as, success of lifelong learning or labour market statistics. The website provides a useful tool for education representatives and policy makers to keep track of their education strategy goals and quantify their progress towards those goals.

Offene Vergaben, a civil society project of the Austrian Freedom of Information Forum, makes public contracts of €50 000 or more traceable and opens up data about procurement procedures. The website’s goal is to make citizens more knowledgeable and aware of how public funds are used.