Copenhagen set to launch world’s first big data marketplace

The City of Copenhagen has teamed up with Hitachi Consulting to launch the world’s first marketplace for public and private data, which companies can use to launch new services for residents.

In theory, anyone can put up data for sale, or for free, on the City Data Exchange (CDE), including citizens, city government, NGOs, academics and businesses.

Hitachi Consulting will be developing its own applications on this platform, however it says in its description of the system that it is “especially designed to enable others (such as small medium enterprises, innovative start-ups and developers) to quickly develop applications that use this information”.

The CDE will go live on 18 May, while a website has gone online today that allows users to find out what datasets are available, to subscribe to the ones that they want to use, and to publish their own.

“Applications are intended to nudge citizens to improve their physical health and carbon footprints. City officials want Copenhagen to be carbon neutral by 2025”

Some data will be free, and some will have a price set by the supplier. The common factor is it must be aggregated, so that what is published does not identify individuals or contain personal or private information.

Among the services to be offered are an “energy insight” app that lets you track how much carbon you are responsible for and a “journey insight” app that will enable citizens to track their transport usage, including information about time spent, calories burned and carbon emitted.

These applications are intended to nudge citizens to improve their physical health and carbon footprints. City officials want Copenhagen to be carbon neutral by 2025.

Hitachi Consulting expects data to come from the city council’s open portal data, the City Bike service, social media, smart sensors on streets and vehicles, academic research projects, meteorological organisations, event planners, energy and water companies and individuals.

Peter Bjørn Larsen, the Hitachi Consulting manager who is the director of the City Data Exchange, speaking at the Big Data Week conference earlier this year, said much of this data was already available on individual websites and in different formats, so one goal was to bring it together in one place where it could be accessed with a single subscription.

The initiative was the result of a collaboration between the City of Copenhagen, the Capital Region and a Danish green technology network called CLEAN. It put out a tender which was won by Hitachi in March 2015.