2.2. The City’s common data platform

One of the objectives of the Data Strategy is for the city to serve as a data platform that shares and utilises data both internally and with external parties, using methods that are as harmonised as possible. This will also allow external parties to serves as service providers and innovators, similarly to City divisions. In other words, the city will become a platform not only in a technical sense, but a business sense as well. The primary goal of the common data platform is to support and inspire City divisions and external parties to utilise and share data with each other. Together with City divisions, the platform will be balanced so that divisions will be able to operate as independent service providers while conforming to the common rules of the platform. The aim is to keep the number of common rules as low as possible by focusing on the essentials and policies mandated by law.

In regard to the technical infrastructure, City divisions have already implemented some solutions of their own. However, the aim is for the City to provide such a good common data warehouse and data lake solution that it will drive the development of harmonised and cost-effective infrastructures over the long term. As such, the architecture of the city’s data platform can be examined as a microservice architecture, where the data sources of individual divisions are located in separate systems that communicate with one another via APIs. The technical solutions are examined in greater detail in Section 6.