Southern Grampians Shire Council launched a smart IoT portal

Today, the Southern Grampians Shire Council (Australia) and Opendatasoft announce the launch of a smart Internet of Things (IoT) portal to boost its attractivity and help local businesses. The data portal, developed on the Opendatasoft platform, provides a one-stop source for smart data coming from real-time IoT LoRaWan sensors. The Council have started with two use cases: mobility (smart parking sensors) and agriculture (weather sensors).

“We are thrilled to kick off this smart IoT initiative with the Southern Grampians Shire Council. This data portal is the perfect example of a small community leveraging its data to boost its digital transformation, increase innovation and attract investment. There is no need to invest a major budget and a significant amount of time to start a smart city journey,” said Franck Carassus, co-founder and COO at Opendatasoft. “Communities can benefit from starting a smart city project even with a few sources of real-time data and take the first step toward a smart ecosystem helping support civic initiatives and innovation.”

This cloud-based data portal is accessible to everyone in the community via open data. The website offers a user-friendly interface improving accessibility regardless of technical knowledge or background. Farmers can access real-time information about rain and humidity rates or temperature data to analyze the soil moisture, allowing them to make more informed decisions based on accurate and timely data. The implementation of smart city initiatives will benefit the community by building local digital capacity, increasing city connectivity and providing data to support decision making and management.

“It’s really exciting to see council data being made freely available to our community. The Opendatasoft platform allows our community to create their own visualizations and slice and dice the data any way they choose. Commencing with localized weather data and parking data, Southern Grampians Shire Council will continue to add datasets to this user-friendly community portal,” said Russell Bennett, Manager Business Systems at Southern Grampians Shire Council.

The Smart Community Services for the Southern Grampians Shire Council has been granted for the Smart Cities and Suburbs Program funded by the Australian government. The $50 million Smart Cities and Suburbs Program is supporting the delivery of innovative smart city projects that improve the livability, productivity and sustainability of cities and towns across Australia. On 17 November 2017, the successful projects of Round One of the Program were announced. Forty-nine projects will benefit from a total of $27.7 million in Australian Government funding, across all states and territories. The Smart Community Services for the Southern Grampians Shire Council is one of them. The Southern Grampians Shire Council is a local government area in the state of Victoria, Australia. It includes the towns of Hamilton, Coleraine, Dunkeld and Penshurst.

Round One was highly competitive, with 176 applications received. The Hon Alan Tudge MP, Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population, announced the outcome of Round Two of the program on 19 November 2018. In Round Two, 32 projects located all around Australia will benefit from over $21 million of Australian Government funding.

Opendatasoft offers its clients market-leading data sharing solutions that allow users to easily publish, manage, combine, analyze, visualize, and share data in a variety of formats on a single platform. Opendatasoft operates in 18 countries with clients ranging from small companies and towns (including Jersey City, the City of Kingston (CA), Town of Cary, NC Commerce, the City of Paris, Bristol, Eindhoven, etc) to large international companies (Schneider Electric, Indigo, Energias de Portugal (EDP), Veolia, Total, Air Liquide, Enedis, Saint-Gobain).