Technical investigations within the civil engineering process as open data

This project aims to make technical investigations available within the civil engineering process in the municipality of Östersund. This will be done as “Open data”. “Open data” in this case means availability under the Creative Commons open data license. The license means that anyone may use, distribute, change, modify and build on the municipality's open data. This also applies in commercial contexts without any restrictions.

Currently, a project is ongoing to collect all technical investigations within the municipality's civil engineering development process. Examples of technical investigations are geotechnical investigations, soil pollution, natural value inventory, noise investigation, etc. The project is ongoing, and the data is available internally within the municipality. All investigations are searchable via an internal map tool. Within this ongoing project, new categories and investigations are added all the time.

This project application intends to investigate the possibility of publishing this data externally as “Open data”. In order to be able to publish data externally under the open data license, we need to investigate the conditions for this. Conditions that need to be investigated are linked to information security, GDPR, data ownership, technical aspects, etcetera.

First and foremost, the conditions must be examined, then the data will be published to the extent of resources. It is important to fully investigate the conditions so that all aspects are investigated.

The benefit of publishing investigations externally is that external developers and consultants get access to all investigations carried out within the civil engineering process. Investigations that have already been carried out do not need to be done again and parts of an investigation can then be reused. A goal could be for ten investigations to be reused by external actors.

The benefit for the municipality is that investigations that are public documents can be easily published and do not have to be handled in the event of an inquiry. A benefit that is difficult to assess, but important for a municipality such as Östersund, is that developers and entrepreneurs want to invest in the municipality. It becomes easier if all conditions are known and clear.

An often-cited benefit of open data is the possibility of innovation and speculation on future innovation. But this type of benefits is often difficult to measure and outside the project's control. This project will however ensure that the conditions for innovation exist.