Open Data Portal of the City of Offenbach online

Where are the most cars actually parked in Offenbach? What is the age structure in the individual neighborhoods? The city of Offenbach is now answering questions like these via the new municipal open data portal and wants to give citizens and companies access to relevant data.

Previously, most of the data was published directly on the offenbach.de website or on request. For over a year now, work has been carried out together with the state of Hesse and municipal IT service providers to set up an open source solution and connect it to the Hessian Open Data Portal, which was published yesterday. All data records from Offenbach will be automatically forwarded to the higher-level portals from Hesse, Germany and the EU. The Offenbach portal was launched in August as a quiet public test operation. Following the successful technical connection, more and more statistical data will now flow into the portal over the coming months.

Offenbach's Lord Mayor Dr. Felix Schwenke considers the accessibility of data to be fundamentally positive: "On the 'offenedaten.offenbach.de' portal, we are creating easy access to municipal data for the public. This data can be used by citizens or companies. This can help to better understand our city. It can help citizens, businesses and, of course, politicians to weigh up decisions carefully. However, we cannot make a blanket promise to make all data accessible free of charge at all times, because we must of course prevent large corporations from making money from our data, while citizens, as the 'owners' of the city and therefore also of their data, receive nothing. However, our fundamental political goal is to make as much data as possible available as open data in the interests of transparency." The project is part of the city's digital and data strategy so that the city administration and municipal utilities can work together digitally and efficiently with well-organized data.