Periodic Reporting for period 2 - USAGE (Urban Data Spaces for Green dEal)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-02-01 bis 2025-07-31
The USAGE (Urban Data Space for Green Deal) project has addressed one of the key challenges faced by European cities today: how to make environmental and climate-related data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) to support the transition towards sustainability and resilience. In the context of the European Green Deal and the European Strategy for Data, USAGE has focused on the local level, that is, cities and towns, where the effects of climate change are most directly experienced and where evidence-based action is urgently needed.
The project aimed to create an urban data ecosystem that enables authorities, researchers, businesses, and citizens to share, access, and use environmental information in a trustworthy and efficient way. To do so, USAGE has developed governance mechanisms, interoperability frameworks, and AI-based tools and workflows that facilitate the combination of heterogeneous data sources such as Earth Observation (EO), Internet of Things (IoT), authoritative, and crowdsourced data.
By promoting data interoperability, transparency, and trust, USAGE empowers cities to make informed policy decisions and engage citizens in climate action through the use of data. The project’s work connects the local and European levels, helping to operationalize the Green Deal principles through a data-driven governance.
USAGE has demonstrated its approach through four pilot cities, Ferrara (Italy), Zaragoza (Spain), Leuven (Belgium), and Graz (Austria), representing diverse environmental, social, and governance contexts. These pilots illustrate how common principles and shared infrastructures can be adapted to different local realities, ensuring that the solutions developed within USAGE are scalable, reusable, and impactful across Europe.
The project aimed to create an urban data ecosystem that enables authorities, researchers, businesses, and citizens to share, access, and use environmental information in a trustworthy and efficient way. To do so, USAGE has developed governance mechanisms, interoperability frameworks, and AI-based tools and workflows that facilitate the combination of heterogeneous data sources such as Earth Observation (EO), Internet of Things (IoT), authoritative, and crowdsourced data.
By promoting data interoperability, transparency, and trust, USAGE empowers cities to make informed policy decisions and engage citizens in climate action through the use of data. The project’s work connects the local and European levels, helping to operationalize the Green Deal principles through a data-driven governance.
USAGE has demonstrated its approach through four pilot cities, Ferrara (Italy), Zaragoza (Spain), Leuven (Belgium), and Graz (Austria), representing diverse environmental, social, and governance contexts. These pilots illustrate how common principles and shared infrastructures can be adapted to different local realities, ensuring that the solutions developed within USAGE are scalable, reusable, and impactful across Europe.
The main work and achievements for the core WPs are the following ones:
- WP2: This WP has contributed to a better understanding of the challenges regarding the Green Deal policy framework at the urban level. A very comprehensive status quo assessment of where the four pilot cities are has been conducted, including the identification of needs and challenges in using data around European Green Deal (EGD) priorities. Building on these results, use cases were developed, including needs-specific solutions, which were then evaluated in relation to local policy commitments, decision-making processes, and their potential to be integrated into the environmental policy cycle. It was also successfully employed a range of approaches to facilitate new practices in the use of environmental data, including thematic workshops, ‘learning-by-doing’ activities with practitioners and community events to engage the broader local ecosystem.
- WP3: Available standards and solutions for FAIR data publication and exchange have been mapped to each data space building block as defined by the Data Space Support Centre - DSSC - after a comprehensive review of current frameworks. The standards to be used in each use case are planned, starting from such a mapping, to ensure a thorough coverage of the data space aspects. Within the use cases definition, the data and software requirements have been specified. Following the use cases analysis, the available datasets and software responding to the defined requirements were retrieved through existing or improved standardised metadata, including provenance and license interoperable information. The missing data and applications have been acquired or developed, in collaboration with WP4.
- WP4: The procedures to collect, process and share geospatial data (and algorithms & tools) to support the EU Green Deal actions, specifically in the project pilot areas, have been identified and developed when necessary. Such data are accessible using web-based tools with the aim to offer data spaces of the pilot urban areas. And with the support of pilot partners, USAGE solutions are now being used in the 4 project pilots with the aim to support policy makers in the delivery of appropriate strategies to boost environmental monitoring and mitigate climate changes.
- WP5: Several and diverse validation activities have been executed to support the deployment of the urban data spaces in the four pilot cities, ranging from technical aspects (e.g. to increase the quality of metadata of datasets and tools algorithms, to ensure consistency of the use cases workflow documentation and coherence of Decision Ready Information with local green deal priorities), to organisational aspects (e.g. simulating an overall data space validation by an hypothetical data space management board), to a validation of the non-technical building blocks of the Blueprint of the Data Space Support Centre (DSSC). The initial set of validation indicators was refined and the validation dashboard updated with the last set of measurements of the final indicators and of the distance from their targets. All these validation activities have been executed with a strong involvement of the pilot cities and of their technical partners.
- WP2: This WP has contributed to a better understanding of the challenges regarding the Green Deal policy framework at the urban level. A very comprehensive status quo assessment of where the four pilot cities are has been conducted, including the identification of needs and challenges in using data around European Green Deal (EGD) priorities. Building on these results, use cases were developed, including needs-specific solutions, which were then evaluated in relation to local policy commitments, decision-making processes, and their potential to be integrated into the environmental policy cycle. It was also successfully employed a range of approaches to facilitate new practices in the use of environmental data, including thematic workshops, ‘learning-by-doing’ activities with practitioners and community events to engage the broader local ecosystem.
- WP3: Available standards and solutions for FAIR data publication and exchange have been mapped to each data space building block as defined by the Data Space Support Centre - DSSC - after a comprehensive review of current frameworks. The standards to be used in each use case are planned, starting from such a mapping, to ensure a thorough coverage of the data space aspects. Within the use cases definition, the data and software requirements have been specified. Following the use cases analysis, the available datasets and software responding to the defined requirements were retrieved through existing or improved standardised metadata, including provenance and license interoperable information. The missing data and applications have been acquired or developed, in collaboration with WP4.
- WP4: The procedures to collect, process and share geospatial data (and algorithms & tools) to support the EU Green Deal actions, specifically in the project pilot areas, have been identified and developed when necessary. Such data are accessible using web-based tools with the aim to offer data spaces of the pilot urban areas. And with the support of pilot partners, USAGE solutions are now being used in the 4 project pilots with the aim to support policy makers in the delivery of appropriate strategies to boost environmental monitoring and mitigate climate changes.
- WP5: Several and diverse validation activities have been executed to support the deployment of the urban data spaces in the four pilot cities, ranging from technical aspects (e.g. to increase the quality of metadata of datasets and tools algorithms, to ensure consistency of the use cases workflow documentation and coherence of Decision Ready Information with local green deal priorities), to organisational aspects (e.g. simulating an overall data space validation by an hypothetical data space management board), to a validation of the non-technical building blocks of the Blueprint of the Data Space Support Centre (DSSC). The initial set of validation indicators was refined and the validation dashboard updated with the last set of measurements of the final indicators and of the distance from their targets. All these validation activities have been executed with a strong involvement of the pilot cities and of their technical partners.
USAGE has shown how cities can implement the European Green Deal and Data Strategy through data-driven solutions, integrating geospatial and environmental data into trustworthy, FAIR, and interoperable data spaces for evidence-based decisions. A main outcome is the USAGE ToolBox, a modular suite of 14 Key Exploitable Results combining urban analytics tools (e.g. urban heat islands, emissions, flooding) with services for capacity building, engagement, and citizen science. Beyond technology, USAGE advances governance and validation mechanisms for urban data spaces and promotes cross-disciplinary collaboration to support cities’ green transition.