How Fondazione Openpolis strengthens the analysis of territorial inequalities thanks to Openapi APIs

The Fondazione Openpolis is an independent, non-profit organization that promotes data culture as an infrastructure of democracy. Through the collection, systematization and analysis of information on politics, power, public spending, services and territories, Openpolis builds informational tools accessible to citizens, media, institutions and third-sector organizations.
The foundation’s work covers the entire data value chain: from source mapping to the creation of structured databases, up to the publication of digital platforms, dashboards and data journalism content. In recent years, the focus has been particularly on high-granularity territorial analysis, with the aim of measuring and reducing inequalities in access to services, especially in urban and metropolitan areas.

 

The strategic vision: from analysis to enabling infrastructure

In the current three-year period, Openpolis has summarized its direction in the vision of “Fucina Civica”, with the goal of evolving from a producer of analysis into an enabling information infrastructure for the civic ecosystem.
Among the strategic priorities:

• strengthening power accountability through the monitoring of spending flows and institutional levels;
• deepening the analysis of territorial and social inequalities;
• investing in civic-tech innovation, enhancing APIs and data infrastructures;
• transferring skills through training and collaboration with local communities.

Within this path, scalability and the quality of geographic data have become a critical factor.

The challenge: turning complex datasets into reliable territorial analysis

For Openpolis, the spatial dimension is central: analyzing inequalities means understanding where public services are located — or not located.
The foundation manages large volumes of data from heterogeneous sources, often non-uniform and lacking geographic coordinates. This led to several challenges:

• difficulty in ensuring precision and consistency in service localization;
• high operational time required for manual geocoding;
• risk of errors in building maps and spatial analyses;
• complexity in calculating distances, catchment areas and territorial coverage at an infra-urban level.

To move from descriptive datasets to truly analyzable data, Openpolis needed a scalable and reliable georeferencing infrastructure.

The integrated Openapi APIs: georeferencing, normalization and validation

In 2024–2025, Openpolis integrated Openapi’s APIs into its territorial analysis workflows, particularly within sub-municipal projects and activities related to the report presented during the parliamentary hearing at the Peripheries Commission.
The APIs were used for:

• Accurate georeferencing of addresses, precisely locating service sites such as schools, healthcare facilities and public offices.
• Normalization and validation of territorial datasets, ensuring consistency across different sources.
• Enrichment of internal databases with reliable geographic coordinates, essential for advanced spatial analysis and interactive maps.

The integration addressed not only a technical need but also a methodological one: building a solid data foundation on which to base replicable and verifiable analyses.

The problem solved: scaling geocoding and making analyses replicable

Before adopting the APIs, managing large volumes of addresses required manual intervention and processes that were difficult to scale. This slowed down analysis production and inevitably introduced margins of error in service localization, directly affecting the quality of maps and territorial evaluations.
The integration of georeferencing and normalization APIs transformed this step into an automated and replicable workflow. Openpolis moved from a manual approach to geographic data toward a structured infrastructure capable of processing complex datasets consistently across different projects. The APIs solved a key methodological challenge: making the spatial component of analyses reliable and scalable, enabling the creation of solid data foundations for interpretative models and visualizations.

Operational benefits: more efficiency and more value for the data team

The impact of the integration quickly translated into greater operational efficiency. By automating address georeferencing and validation, the team significantly reduced dataset preparation time and standardized processes across projects. This improved the consistency of spatial analyses and freed up internal resources, allowing data analysts to focus more on higher value-added activities such as data interpretation and data journalism production.
The adoption of APIs therefore fits into the foundation’s civic-tech innovation path, helping make its information infrastructure more solid and sustainable over time.

The results: deeper territorial analysis and data-driven urban policies

Thanks to Openapi APIs, Openpolis has been able to develop more robust and precise sub-municipal analyses, highlighting with greater clarity imbalances in the distribution of services within metropolitan cities. Georeferenced information has also strengthened the empirical foundation of institutional activities, such as the report presented during the parliamentary hearing, supporting arguments with precise maps and territorial data.

At the same time, building reusable geolocated datasets has increased the cumulative value of the work carried out, improving the quality of published visualizations and interactive maps. Looking ahead, this integration consolidates an increasingly data-driven approach to urban policies: no longer generic descriptions of “peripheries”, but measurable evidence about the real distribution of services and opportunities.