Datasets¶

New in version 2021.01: access to data with SPARQL

New in version 2021.02: Open Data Hub Virtual Knowledge Graph and description of underlying Knowledge Model

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¶

Changed in version 2020.09: Updated the list of 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 or ) 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

A note about datasets

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 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., or , a user will be able to retrieve from each dataset only those data that are distributed as Open Data.

At the date of writing, datasets in the Mobility and Tourism domains are available.

Accessing data in the Open Data Hub¶

There are different modalities to access data that are provided by the Open Data Hub, that are listed here. Currently, data from the Mobility and Tourism domains can be accessed, both from the command line and using a browser. Non-interactive access using APIs is also available. Various dedicated tutorials are available in the List of HOWTOs section; while in section Getting Involved you can find additional ways to interact with the data and the Open Data Hub team. The remainder of this section describes all the possibilities to access the Open Data Hub’s datasets and their content.

Browser access

Accessing data in the Open Data Hub by using a browser is useful on different levels: for the casual user, who can have a look at the type and quality of data provided; for a developer, that can use the REST API implemented by the Open Data Hub or even check if the results of his app are coherent with those retrieved with the API; for everyone in order to get acquainted with the various methods to retrieve data.

More in detail, these are the possibilities to interact with Open Data Hub’s data by using a browser:

Go to the Apps Built From Open Data Hub Datasets section of the documentation, particularly sub-sections Production Stage Apps and Beta Stage Apps, and choose one of the web sites and portals that are listed there. Each of them uses the data gathered from one or more OPEN DATA HUB’s datasets to display a number of useful information. You can then see how data are exposed and browse them.

In the same Apps Built From Open Data Hub Datasets section, you can also check the list of the Alpha Stage Apps and choose one of them that you think you can expand, then get in touch with the authors to suggest additional features or collaborate with them to discuss its further development to improve it.

Access the ODH Tourism data browser and search for the Open Data available in the Tourism domain. You can simply use those data for your convenience, or you might even find a novel way to exploit those data and use them in an app or portal you are going to develop. A detailed howto is available: How to use the Open Data Hub’s Tourism Data Browser? to help you getting acquainted with the browser.

Go to the Swagger interface of the datasets in the Tourism domain, located at http://tourism.opendatahub.bz.it/swagger/ui/index to learn how the REST APIs are built and how you can script them to fetch data for your application. To get started, there is a dedicated howto: How to access Tourism Data? that will guide you in the first steps.

Access the Swagger interface of the datasets in the Mobility domain, located at https://mobility.api.opendatahub.bz.it/. Like in the case of the tourism’ Swagger interface, you can learn REST API call for that domain and fetch data for your application. More possibilities to interact with the Mobility domain datasets and the description of the new APIv2 are described in the dedicated howto.

Open the Analytics for Mobility web page, at https://analytics.opendatahub.bz.it/ This portal uses data in the mobility domain to display various information about the sensors, including their locations, what they measure, and actual data in near-real time. You can retrieve data gathered by the sensors directly from the dataset, in almost real-time.

Open the Open Data Hub Knowledge Graph Portal where you can explore all the data that are already available as a virtual knowledge graph. Here you can check out some of the precooked query to see and modify them to suit your needs with the help of W3C’s SPARQL query language; SPARQL can be used also in the Playground to freely query the endpoint.

Programmatic access

Programmatic and non-interactive access to the Open Data Hub’s dataset is possible using any of the following methods made available by the Open Data Hub team.

API

The APIs are composed of a few generic methods, that can be combined with many parameters to retrieve only the relevant data and then post-processed in the preferred way.

The following table summarises how the two versions of the API can be used within the Open Data Hub’s domains.

API	Tourism	Mobility
v1	recommended	deprecated
v2	–	recommended

There are currently two versions of the API, v1 and v2, with the former now deprecated for the Mobility domain and marked as such deprecated throughout the Open Data Hub documentation. New users are recommended to use the new API v2, while users of the API v1 are encouraged to plan a migration to the new API.

The new API v2 has a different approach compared to the previous version, and therefore is not compatible with the API v1, the main difference being that all data stored in the Open Data Hub can now be retrieved from a single endpoint, while with API v1 there was an endpoint for each dataset.

This change in approach requires also a breaking change for the users of API v1. The initial step, indeed, will not be to open the URL of the dataset and start exploring, but to retrieve the stationTypes and then retrieve additional data about each station. A stationType is the main object of a datasets, about which all the information in a dataset relate to; a dataset includes at least one stationType. A new, dedicated howto describing in detail the new API v2 and a few basic examples is already available in the dedicated section of this documentation.

Note

It is important to remark that the API v2 is only available for datasets in the Mobility Domain.

License of the JSON Responses¶

Whenever you query the data in the Open Data Hub, the snippet that you retrieve always includes a block of information called LicenseInfo, similar to the following one:

{
   "LicenseInfo": {
     "Author": "",
     "License": "CC0",
     "ClosedData": false,
     "LicenseHolder": "https://www.lts.it"
   }
}

The highlighted line shows a licence, which in this case is CC0, i.e., public domain and therefore freely reusable.

This block is always included as a child node within a JSON record that starts with an ID and a number of additional information, which may include also hyperlinks to resources that are external to the Open Data Hub, like for example this example which refers to a webcam and contains a link to an external provider where to find actual images from that webcam (snippet code shortened for the sake of simplicity):

{
  "Id": "D3659E1F111C4CDB2EC19F8FC95118B7",
  "Active": true,
  "Streamurl": null,
  "Webcamurl": "https://webtv.feratel.com/webtv/?&pg=5EB12424-7C2D-428A-BEFF-0C9140CD772F&design=v3&cam=6323&c1=0",
  "LicenseInfo": {
    "Author": "",
    "License": "CC0",
    "ClosedData": false,
    "LicenseHolder": "https://www.lts.it"
  }
}

Whenever hyperlinks like the one shown in line 5 above appear, it must not be implied that the license mentioned in the LicenseInfo block (again, CC0) is applied to them: everything contained in that link may be covered by a different licence.

Indeed, the Licence mentioned in LicenseInfo nodes refer only to content of the parent node–i.e., the one that starts with “Id”, not to the content of any of the other children nodes, including Streamurl and Webcamurl.

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 in the Mobility Domain¶

Changed in version 2020.06: Direct link to the browsable version of the datasets.

Changed in version 2020.09: Improved description of datasets in the mobility domain, including external links, use cases, and Data Providers.

Changed in version 2020.09: added dropdowns to the list of datasets to improve usability

_images/Mobility-domain.png — Figure 3 The dataset in the Mobility Domain at a glance.¶

This section contains information about the datasets in the Mobility Domain and how to access them using the API that the Open Data Hub team developed and made available.

Note

Recall that the API v1 for the Mobility Domain is now deprecated.

The description of each dataset includes the following information:

Output	The output format of the API call
E-mail contact	An e-mail contact for the dataset
API version	The versions of the API that can be used to access dataset
`StationType`	The direct link to each `stationType` included in the dataset
Use cases and info	Link to web sites that use the dataset and to use cases based on the dataset
Web component	Link to Web Components developed on top of the dataset (optional)
Sources	The list of Data Providers whose data compose the dataset

Note

There is one StationType, namely MobileStation which is a mobile probe no longer active. It will always return an empty set of values, because historical data are not available in the Open Data Hub.

The datasets in the Mobility domain are grouped in Traffic and Mobility sub-domains as follows:

Traffic¶

The Mobility/Traffic sub-domain contains data about traffic (like e.g., real time traffic load of a street, environmental measurement) that are useful to plan a trip with an own means of transport, for example a car, or a bike.

Mobility¶

The Mobility/Mobility sub-domain contains data about public transportation, sharing of transport means, and recharging stations for e-cars.

Changed in version 2020.09: Improved description of datasets in the mobility/mobility domain, including new information

Deprecated since version 2020.10: Public Transportation dataset

Datasets in the Tourism Domain¶

_images/Tourism-domain.png — Figure 4 The dataset in the Tourism Domain at a glance.¶

This section contains information about the dataset in the Tourism Domain and how to access them using the API that the Open Data Hub team developed and made available.

Datasets presented here are related to all kind of touristic activities in South Tyrol. By exploring this domain, it is possible to find information about winter and summer offers from local touristic boards, information about weather, hotels and accommodation, Points of Interests, and a lot more.

Changed in version 2020.10: Changed identifier of datasets activity, event, gastronomy, package, and POI

New in version 2020.10: API URL for all Tourism datasets.

The following information is provided for each dataset in the Tourism domain:

Output	The output format of the API call
E-mail contact	An e-mail contact for the dataset
API version	The versions of the API that can be used to access the dataset
Swagger URL	The URL of the swagger interface to the data
API URL	The URL of the browsable version of the dataset
Use cases and info	Link to web sites that use the dataset and to use cases based on the dataset
Android App	Link to app for mobile phones developed using the data in the dataset
Sources	The list of Data Providers whose data compose the dataset
SPARQL Endpoint	Dataset is accessible through the SPARQL Endpoint 1

1: This information is provided only if the dataset is accessible through SPARQL.

Datasets in Other Domains¶

The Open Data Hub Virtual Knowledge Graph¶

New in version 2021.02: Description of the Knowledge Model underlying datasets Accommodation, Gastronomy, and Event datasets

Some datasets in the Open Data Hub, namely Accommodation, Gastronomy, and Event, are organised into a Virtual Knowledge Graph that can be accessed using SPARQL from the dedicated SPARQL endpoint. In order to define more precise queries, this section describes the Knowledge Models (KM) underlying these datasets; the description of each KM is accompanied by an UML diagram which shows the KM at a glance.

Besides standard W3C’s OWL and RDF vocabularies, the Open Data Hub VKG uses:

schema.org for most of the entities used
geosparql for geo-references and coordinates of objects
purl for linking to related resources

Common Notation

Diagrams use UML class diagram formalism widely adopted in Knowledge Representation and in particular in the W3C’s Recommendation documents for the Semantic Web. The following additional notation applies:

Prefix: The default prefix used for classes and properties is http://schema.org/. This means that, unless differently stated, the definition of classes and properties, including their attributes, rely on a common standard as defined in schema.org’s vocabulary. As examples, see the LodgingBusiness class and the containedInPlace property.

Hint

Other prefixes are explicitly pre-pended to the Class or Property name, like e.g., noi:numberOfUnits.
Arrows: Arrows with a white tip denote a sub-class relationship, while black tips denote object properties.
Cardinality: Cardinality of 1 is usually not shown, but implied; the look across notation is used. For example, the image on the right-hand side–excerpt from the event dataset VKG–can be read as 0 to N MeetingRooms are ContainedInPlace Place.

Output	XML, multipart/form-data
E-mail contact	help@opendatahub.bz.it
AlpineBits versions	v2017-10, v2018-10 (coming soon 2020-10)
AlpineBits Endpoint	https://alpinebits.opendatahub.bz.it/AlpineBits

Output	JSON, mime-type application/json
E-mail contact
API version	v1 deprecated, v2
`StationType`	EnvironmentStation
Use cases and info	https://analytics.opendatahub.bz.it/, Project STODT
Sources	APPA Bolzano, APPA Trento, A22 Municipality of Bolzano

Output	JSON, mime-type application/json
E-mail contact	contact
API version	v1 deprecated, v2
`StationType`	ParkingStation, ParkingSensor
Use cases and info	https://parking.bz.it, https://mobility.meran.eu, https://analytics.opendatahub.bz.it, https://mobility.bz.it
Sources	Municipalities of Bolzano, Merano, Trento and Rovereto

Output	JSON, mime-type application/json
E-mail contact
API version	v1 deprecated, v2
`StationType`	CarpoolingHub CarpoolingService CarpoolingUser
Use cases and info	https://carpooling.bz.it/ https://mobility.meran.eu/ https://analytics.opendatahub.bz.it/
Sources	Bezirksgemeinschaft Burggrafenamt/Comunità Comprensoriale Burgraviato, Inno.vìe

Output	JSON, mime-type application/json
E-mail contact
API version	v1 deprecated, v2
`StationType`	CarsharingStation
Use cases and info	https://mobility.meran.eu/ https://analytics.opendatahub.bz.it/ https://mobility.bz.it/
Sources	Car Sharing Südtirol Alto Adige