Oliveira de Azeméis, with its 70.000 inhabitants, is the most recent city to join Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC). The Portuguese OASC chapter is now counting seven member cities and more cities are lining up to join.
Located in the Porto Metropolitan Area, Oliveira de Azeméis is home to more than 7.000 businesses making Oliveira de Azeméis rank 7th in terms of international trade in the Northern Region of Portugal. An industrial powerhouse, the city now has high ambitions for its digital transformation.
“The City of Oliveira de Azeméis is proud to be an active member of the Open & Agile Smart Cities network. We are looking forward to take part in the debate and to find out how emerging standards can support cities and communities like Oliveira de Azeméis in our ambition to stimulate local innovation”, said Joaquim Jorge Ferreira, Mayor of Oliveira de Azeméis.
Open Data as Building Block
Driven by the city and with support of the city’s ecosystem, including the University of Aveiro, an industrial park, and a business centre to foster the entrepreneurial development, Oliveira de Azeméis aims at exploring and building solutions for transparency, community building and economic development around open data.
The city is particularly wants to make more and better data publicly available. By joining OASC, the city aims to promote knowledge transfer activities as well as to contribute for building a European approach for technology and open platforms in order to boost the local, national and European levels.
Margarida Campolargo, Coordinator of OASC Portugal, said: “It’s with great enthusiasm and pride that we see, more than three years after the first Portuguese cities joined the Open & Agile Smart Cities, OASC Portugal continues to grow. OASC as a non-profit organisation aims to strengthen this community around the world and support cities to navigate the complex field of emerging standards to create smarter cities and communities.”
Oliveira de Azeméis is currently implementing several projects to boost the development of a local innovation ecosystem, including:
1) Local Archive Public Access Portal
The Local Archive is a web-based archive description portal, based on open source application for standards-based archival description and access in a multilingual, multi-repository environment. Using OAI-PMH standard harvesting it connects to the Portuguese National Archive Portal and consequently to the European Archive Portal.
The portal is built on CKAN and it is the basis of an important ongoing development to make data openly available. The portal connects to the Portuguese National Open Data Portal and also links to the European Data Portal.
