Dubai to turn more economic data public

Dubai: Lack of transparency has long been a key challenge for anyone investing in emerging markets. But in Dubai, the government is hoping to change that.

Smart Dubai Office, the government entity tasked with carrying out a smart transformation across the city, called on government and semi-government entities to provide more data points to the public to allow for better transparency.

The data will be available online, with many of it open for viewing by the public. It will include various economic indicators, as well as data on mobility in the city, the environment, and transactional data, among other sets.

Younus Al Nasser, assistant director general of Smart Dubai and chief executive of Smart Dubai Data, said the data available will help with economic analysis, and assured that it would not contain any personal user data.

“We already have on Dubai Pulse more than 400 data sets that were [provided by] more than 35 entities that participated in the first cycle with us,” he said. “For open data, everyone locally or globally can access it. For shared data, it’s only available to government entities and that’s by permission.”

Dubai Pulse is a website set up by the Smart Dubai Office that has data on housing, finance, education, employment, health, and transport, among other segments. The data is collected from various entities that include Dubai Statistics Centre, Dubai Municipality, Dubai Customs, Dubai Chamber of Commerce, Dubai Land Department, and Dubai Courts, among others.

This followed the introduction of the Dubai data law in 2015 that aimed to increase transparency, and provide open data to companies and individuals while also protecting the privacy of individuals online.

“What we are trying to do now is to accelerate the compliance [of public and semi-public entities] to Dubai data law by 50 per cent. This means, by default, the number of data sets available on Dubai Pulse will increase,” Al Nasser told Gulf News.

He said it will be up to each entity to identify the right data sets to submit to the Smart Dubai Office, adding that the data provided will also have to comply with the classifications stipulated by Dubai Data Policies.

Al Nasser was speaking at an event on Sunday to launch Data First, a ‘challenge’ for Smart Dubai’s partners to collect, organize, and submit relevant data over the next six months. The data submitted will then be reviewed by Smart Dubai and made available on the Dubai Pulse website, as part of broader plans to turn Dubai into a smart city.

Al Nasser was speaking at an event on Sunday to launch Data First, a ‘challenge’ for Smart Dubai’s partners to collect, organize, and submit relevant data over the next six months. The data submitted will then be reviewed by Smart Dubai and made available on the Dubai Pulse website, as part of broader plans to turn Dubai into a smart city.