City of Sapporo. FIWARE4Cities book ed. 6

In this weekly series, we present to you each time one innovative city on its digital journey and on its way to become smart(er). This time, we have the City of Sapporo for you.

Sapporo is the capital of Hokkaido, the northmost major island of Japan, with 1.95 million inhabitants. It is the political, economic, and cultural centre of Hokkaido, and the 1972 Winter Olympic Games made it famous worldwide. The city has modern urban functions in its central area and rich nature in the suburbs. This harmony has made Sapporo the top-ranked Japanese city in terms of attractiveness. Every February, the Sapporo Snow Festival welcomes 2million tourist visitors.

The ICT strategy for Sapporo has been to solve regional problems and to create innovation. The city implemented “Sapporo’s ICT Utilisation Platform” in 2017 and has supported public-private data collaboration and utilisation.

As the next step, the city government concluded that it was necessary to encourage the participation of a greater number of business actors whilst enhancing the variety and quality of data to be shared. Finally, the city launched the Data Trading Market, where both open data and priced private-sector data are exchanged monolithically.

Data Trading Market

The City of Sapporo launched the Data Trading Market in December 2022 as a first- of-its-kind initiative in Japan championed by the local government. The aim is to enable the sharing of data owned by both public and private sectors on top of the internet toward new business creation and solving region-specific problems. Expected use cases include using people flow pattern data in underground shopping complexes for shop owners planning a branch opening strategy. As a technical consideration, the city regarded trading business-owned data and alternative data from IoT devices as the key to realising a sustainable community. The Data Trading Market should also be open to anyone via API, and the adoption of globally recognised open standards was another key.

FIWARE’s Context Broker was adopted as a good match for such a policy, and 日本电气股份有限公司 became the system provider for the Data Trading Market, which integrates open government data and data provided by business players. For the operation and management of the Data Trading Market, the city administration collaborates with the regional organisations of Sapporo Electronics and Industries Cultivation Foundation and Sapporo Innovation Lab.