Intercommunale Leiedal and the City of Kortrijk are front-runners in Belgium in delivering digital public services. In Data for All, they will go one step further to reinforce their data sovereignty. With support of VIVES University of Applied Sciences, they will work together to improve and boost the platform Leiedal Data as a Service (LDAAS) into a vertical data exchange platform between regional and municipal authorities as well as platforms of higher administrative levels. A first practical use-case related to data-driven cycling policy in Kortrijk will be tested and then applied to other municipalities in the region.
What is the challenge?
Kortrijk, Leiedal and VIVES are confronted to three key challenges:
The dynamic region of Southwest Flanders, where the rivers Leie and Scheldt meet, comprises 13 municipalities. The region is located right on the French border and connects cities like Antwerp and Ghent (BE) with Lille (FR) via an important east-west axis, the E17. The region's dynamic nature and strategic location necessitate ensuring accessibility to and within the area for both people and goods in a sustainable, attractive, and safe manner. This involves effectively monitoring traffic flows and developments, including sustainable mobility modes such as cycling. Data-driven policy-making and evaluation play crucial roles in addressing this challenge.
While the availability of data has increased in recent years, its utilization for policy objectives and citizen services remains underutilized due to various factors. These include closed software applications, inadequate data sharing between governmental bodies, and limited knowledge and awareness among domain experts and policymakers. Collaborating and sharing data while clarifying ownership, responsibilities, data models, content, standards, and data traffic between local and regional platforms is essential.
Ethical challenges come in different ways. First, it’s important to take ethics into account in the way municipalities deal with data and data infrastructure. To improve the implementation, there is also the need to identify the citizens' values, in the context of data to which they actively or unconsciously contribute. How citizens perceive data sharing, as well as how their reasoning and decision-making processes can or may change, is a challenge the TRAFFIC < OF > DATA pilot aims to address. Insights created will not only be valuable in data related to mobility issues but also beyond.
How does Data for All help?
Kortrijk, Leiedal, and VIVES outlined their approach to address key challenges through data and mobility objectives.
Data objectives:
- Collecting correct, qualitative data (both regionally and in the project area) in a regional data platform, considering the applicable standards, scalability, reuse and privacy.
- Gathering insights by processing, analysing and combining the different datasets.
- Increasing the use of data by policy and mobility experts by making it available in a user-friendly application making visualization, analysis (and eventually forecasting) possible.
- Development of a legal, technical, ethical and governance framework of guidelines for the establishment of essential collaborations in data exchange.
- Making data available as open data.
Mobility objectives:
- Getting an overview of available mobility data at specific locations, aiming at using this data for research, monitoring and evaluation (e.g. where have traffic counts been carried out in the past, location of shared cars/bicycles whose use is being monitored)
- Responding to citizen queries quickly using available data (e.g., questions about traffic density, excessive speed). If possible, Data for All partners aim to proactively make certain information accessible to citizens, allowing them to access relevant data themselves, like traffic count results.
- Investigating and evaluating the impact of mobility decisions on a micro-level (e.g., circulation measures) to evaluate efficacy and impact of measures and interventions.
- Monitoring the trends and changes in mobility at a macro-level (e.g., modal shift, traffic density, number of accidents, parking pressure)
Participating partners
Intercommunale Leiedal is a regional public partner for thirteen municipalities in South-West Flanders, Belgium. Its core activity is urban and regional development. Leiedal aims to develop an innovative and sustainable smart region. It therefore supports its municipalities in their digital transformation and in the daily provision of digital services to citizens and companies. Leiedal’s Data as a Service (LDAAS) platform collects, updates, processes, and makes data available in multiple applications, thereby offering data services to municipalities, companies, and citizens in the Leiedal region and beyond. LDAAS will be enhanced into a platform for processing and sharing data across administrative levels. Its functionality is proven through a use case.
The City of Kortrijk is a prominent city among the in total thirteen municipalities of the Leiedal region in Belgium. It is a historical city situated in South of West-Flanders, Belgium. The Kortrijk agglomeration is embedded in the dynamic Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai.
Kortrijk has, up to now, implemented several basic dashboards. Kortrijk is currently working to set up a data warehouse, integrating data from multiple heterogeneous sources to support analytical reporting and decision making. It furthermore collects data for reporting on the relation between city crowds and their expenditures as well as passenger counting. Kortrijk will work closely together with Leiedal and VIVES to develop a use case around traffic monitoring and regulation, starting with a thorough data inventory and data landscape analysis while later setting up and testing both a technical infrastructure and a digital service, based on data exchange with LDAAS.
VIVES University of Applied Sciences is a state-recognized higher education institution. Its core mission is to ensure higher education for students at bachelor level in the study areas of Applied engineering & Technology, Biotechnology, Education, Commercial Sciences & Business Management, and Health Care & Applied Social Studies. VIVES will accompany Leiedal and Kortrijk in the strategic and technical definition and implementation of the pilot. It will provide them with framework knowledge around ethical consideration in gathering, analysing, and visualising data.
