Smart Dubai launches “Data First, The City’s Data Challenge” and hopes to encourage government and semi-government data partners to collaborate on managing city data
“Data First, The City’s Data Challenge”, a six-month long challenge that would bring together Smart Dubai’s government and semi-government data partners, has been launched. Smart Dubai aims to underline the importance of collective efforts in data collection, management and insight generation with this initiative. The announcement came on Sunday at Data First’s official launch event.
The challenge would like to recognize three entities that have made most the significant progress in accordance with five key criteria: Data law compliance (from July 2019 to January 2020), Smart Dubai data event attendance (ecosystem enhancement) and cooperation on data requests from other semi-government and government entities.
Data availability will heavily be increased on Dubai Pulse with this, as ingestion cycles and data-driven culture will be supported through external and internal workshops and awareness programmes. The challenge will identify the entities that have made valuable contributions in their respective fields by providing their data to the Dubai Pulse program.
According to Zawya, the challenge would also highlight the enormous value data can bring to the emirate, and encourage all the stakeholders to multiply their efforts to gather and present data. Dr. Aisha bint Butti bin Bishr, Director-General of Smart Dubai, told WAM, "Data has always been an important element in the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, who has always believed that to successfully utilise emerging technologies and capitalise on investment opportunities in that sector, we need to first identify and supply the right datasets."
"With that in mind, we are delighted to be launching the Data First, The City’s Data Challenge among all our data partners from government and semi-government entities, to emphasise that ‘Data’ is the ‘First’ and most crucial element of our smart city transformation plans, and we look forward to awarding the three entities that have exhibited the highest levels of compliance with the Dubai Data framework and policies," she added.
In turn, Younus Al Nasser, Assistant Director-General of Smart Dubai and CEO of Smart Dubai Data, noted, "We have been working with entities across the emirate to collect and organise city data, in line with the Dubai Data Law announced in October 2015, which called on all government and semi-government entities in Dubai to share their data with Smart Dubai. With the cooperation and support of all of our partners, we have identified and categorised more than 400 data sets on the Dubai Pulse platform – the digital backbone of the emirate’s smart transformation. Dubai Pulse and Data First will act as global benchmarks for how the pooling of urban data can improve government efficiency, boost private enterprise and fuel smart city innovation.”
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