Lisbon is committed with the opening of data sets with high value for civic participation and support to economic activities and to the development of new services. As a result, several data sets, including points of interest and events occurring all over the city, are available in a portal exclusively dedicated to promote open participation – Lisboa Participa. The tools provided by CitySDK helped to organise the data sets held by the City, allowing them to be accessed and used by developers through the CitySDK Tourism API.
The CitySDK Tourism API was developed by the team responsible for the Lisbon pilot and has been made publicly available since May of 2013. Since its deployment, the API was used to open data gathered by the Municipality of Lisbon, as well as to create and publish three new itineraries across high value touristic locations. A directory server has also been created and it is in the final testing phase before going public, enabling applications to automatically roam among cities by discovering which endpoints to use in each city.
One goal of CitySDK is to allow developers from all over Europe to use the APIs of the project to create applications and services for different cities. Fulfilling this goal, the CitySDK Tourism API was already used by Finnish developers to create Spot-in-Lisbon, an application for Android that provides a touristic guide for the city of Lisbon.
Spot-in-Lisbon allows the users to search for points of interest and events, provided by the Municipality, by categories and featuring descriptions and useful information such as schedules, prices and navigation instructions. The developers had already created a similar application – Spot-in-Helsinki, which was used as a base of concept and integrated with the CitySDK Tourism API to build the version for Lisbon. The developers are now in contact with the Pilot Team to provide feedback to improve the API.