Domains and Datasets

What is a Domain?

A Domain is a category that contains entities that are closely related. In the Open Data Hub, each domain roughly identifies one social or economical category; the domains intended as sources for data served by the Open Data Hub are depicted at the bottom of Figure 1.

Currently, the domains that can be accessed through the Open Data Hub are:

  1. Mobility, this domain contains data about public transportation, parkings, charging station, and so on.

  2. Tourism: data about events, accomodations, points of interest, and so on.

  3. Other domain: a special category that encompasses domains that do not fall in any of the above category.

Each domain is composed by datasets, each of which contains data that provide useful information for the domain.

It is important to note that there is no clear separation between two domains. For example, data about public transportation belong to the Mobility domain, but are also useful for the Tourism domain.

The goal of the Open Data Hub project is to make available datasets containing data about the South Tyrolean ecosystem, to allow third parties to develop novel applications on top of them, consuming the exposed data. These applications may range from a simple processing of datasets to extract statistical data and to display the result in different graphic formats like pie-charts, to far more complex applications that combine data from different datasets and correlate them in some useful way.

As seen in Figure 1, data originate from different domains (Mobility, Tourism, and so on); they are gathered from sensors and packed together by Data Providers. Sensors can be for example GPS devices installed on buses that send their real-time geographic position or a small electronic device on a plug of an e-charging station that checks the if the plug is being used or not, to let people know that the charging outlet is available.

Datasets are accessible through a REST API, the URL of each endpoint is given along with other information in the description of each dataset, see the lists of datasets in the remainder of this section.

Data Providers

A Data Provider is any entity that shares their Open Data with the Open Data Hub project, allowing their free reuse (ideally under a free licence like CC0 license (public domain) or CC BY-SA license) from any third-party that relies on the Open Data Hub to build their application. These entities can be private companies or enterprises, public bodies, and even private citizen, if they have interesting data about South Tyrol to share.

The Open Data exposed by the Open Data Hub originate from data and datasets owned by different actors (called Data Providers) which are at this time mostly local public bodies. Since there is no direct 1-to-1 correspondence between Data Providers and datasets, we currently offer a list of data providers whose data can be pulled from Open Data Hub. Indeed, an Open Data Hub dataset can be composed of data deriving from different providers, while a provider can submit to Open Data Hub multiple types of data that will belong to more than one dataset.

The Open Data Hub's Data Providers are:

  • Autostrada del Brennero/Brennerautobahn management of the A22 motorway infrastructure

  • Alperia/Neogy energy provider for South Tyrol

  • APPA Bolzano South Tyrolean agency for the environment

  • APPA Trento Trentino Agency of the environment

  • Bezirksgemeinschaft Burggrafenamt Comunità Comprensoriale Burgraviato

  • Carsharing Alto Adige via its technological partner DB Rent

  • CISMA bluetooth sensors

  • IDM Südtirol/Alto Adige trailblazer for economic development in South Tyrol

  • H2 Südtirol Alto Adige energy company

  • HGV Hoteliers- und Gastwirteverband

  • Inno.vìe mobility solutions

  • LTS South Tyrol Association of Tourism Organisations

  • Municipality of Bolzano

  • Municipality of Merano

  • Municipality of Rovereto

  • Municipality of Trento

  • NOI Techpark technology and science park of South Tyrol

  • Route220, Nevicam and Driwe e-charging stations provider

  • SASA public transport operator

  • SIAG Südtirol Informatica AG - Informatica Alto Adige

  • Südtirol Wein - Vini Alto Adige consortium of South Tyrol Wines

Datasets, Open Data, and Licenses

The Open Data Hub contains many datasets: a few have been provided for testing purposes, other are meant for internal use only, and other contain only a part of their data that is available as Open Data.

While the goal of the Open Data Hub project is to expose only Open Data and the Open Data Hub team members always suggest to use CC0 license (public domain) to third-parties releasing datasets, it is not yet possible for the Open Data Hub team to guarantee the availability as open data of all the data in the datasets, because the data licensing and its distribution rights are decided by the copyright holder of each dataset.

Since some of the datasets may contain data that can not be distributed by the Open Data Hub team under an open licence like, e.g., CC0 license (public domain) or CC BY-SA license, a user will be able to retrieve from each dataset only those data that are distributed as Open Data. The response to a query is in JSON format (although CSV output can be forced) and is always licensed as Open Data. However, the response may include resources like links to web pages, streams, or images that are subject to a different, even proprietary, licence. For more information about this topic, there is a dedicated section in the appendices.

At the date of writing, datasets mostly fall in either the Mobility and the Tourism domains; while a few more uncategorised datasets are available.

Authentication

The authentication layer is currently intended for internal use only. All data in the dataset that you can receive from the Open Data Hub are free to use and do not require any type of authentication.

The authentication layer can be of interest for developers who want to collaborate in the development of Open Data Hub; Details on the implementation are available in section Authentication in the Open Data Hub.

Datasets

Changed in version 2022.06: API v1 for Mobility domain are no longer available.

Changed in version 2022.10: Removed information about datasets

The list of datasets and all the information associated with them have been moved to the Open Data Hub main web site with the same categorisation, hence you can find them in the following pages:

To access the dataset, please refer to the How to Access Mobility Data With API v2 and How to access Tourism Data? howtos, which helps you getting started in retrieving data from the Mobility and Tourism datasets, and to the other howtos are available in the dedicated section.

Technical Information for Mobility Dataset and Technical Information for Tourism Dataset are still available in this documentation portal.