By bringing together public and private partners providing services of public interest, Explore.Porto disrupts the service design process. Usually, the teams responsible for designing services tend to work in silos and, therefore, to arrive at compartimentalised solutions. This innovation was developed following a user-centered approach, which has a considerable impact on the adoption of local services. It must also be highlighted, as a differentiation factor, the collaboration with European cities, namely Helsinki, Antwerp and Tallinn. These partnerships are part of the European strategy to value open data models, ensuring the future sustainability of the platform. This allows for the development of new components by start-ups, that will create added value on top of the developed platform. As promoted by the network of Open and Agile Smart Cities, the collaborative development of digital services increases the potential for scalability and solution adaptability.

The innovation is currently in the “diffusing lessons” stage, having been identified as a reference for other Municipality services. Its applicability will be potentiated with the integration with other online platforms such as Shop in Porto, which promotes local businesses in the city of Porto. This way, data related to mobility, and points of interest present in the platform can be combined with other relevant information to provide citizens and tourists with a more complete experience and guide them towards making conscious decisions regarding environmental sustainability. Moreover, Explore.Porto has already fueled other open innovation initiatives in the city of Porto such as the data competition Hackacity, which uses datasets containing the data present in the platform to answer a specific challenge. This promotes direct feedback on the data provided by partners, allowing them to incorporate important insights on their own data projects.

Explore.Porto is the result of a collaboration between several departments of the Municipality, Porto Digital, STCP, Metro do Porto, Associação de Turismo do Porto e Norte and private entities, such as taxi and other transport operators. These partnerships proved to be essential for the development of an integrated service focused on the needs of its users. The partnership with the city of Helsinki is also noteworthy, from which resulted a first version of the platform.

Porto Digital worked with co-creation tools, involving the citizens and technicians of the Municipality in the design of the solution that best responded to the challenge. In order to ensure that the innovation developed responds adequately to the needs and interests of its users, Explore.Porto was developed by applying service design methodologies. Co-creation empowers citizens and promotes their engagement in the process, allowing for the creation of better solutions.

Explore.Porto reaches users through a responsive web application which is available for both desktop and mobile. The innovation has two main beneficiaries:

1. The end-user, citizens and visitors who access the web app and explore the city by selecting routes or points of interest. Users can also get more information through the “learn more” button.
2. Partners, who register on the platform as new administrators and add points of interest or mobility data by entering and validating the information that will be accessed by the end-user.

Explore.Porto has been generating positive effects in two main areas: tourism development and environmental sustainability. Regarding the former, the innovation can offer remarkable added value, whether the tourist has a pre-defined plan or prefers a more organic discovery of the city. In what concerns the latter, the centralization of information about soft mobility, public transport and taxis, in one platform, contributes positively to their promotion. This encourages citizens and visitors to choose means of transport with lower pollution rates as alternatives to the car. At the same time, the routes proposed by Explore.Porto favor optimization and reduction of unnecessary environmental emissions.

In 2022, the results reveal a strong usage rate, more than 120,000 users with a return rate of more than 30%. Especially considering it started in a completely organic way and was only in June 2021 that the mobile app was made available to the public.

Explore.Porto and the Official Repository of Points of Interest (ROPI) are part of the current digital innovation strategy of the Municipality of Porto, which focuses on the integrated development of open-source models. ROPI aims to centralize information about points of interest and events in the city and make it accessible on an open basis. This is allowed through databases that feed other products such as Explore.Porto, maintaining an open data interface for public consultation.

The main challenge of the development of this application was the integration of data from various departments and entities. Missing schemas, low granularity, parsing errors, incomplete data and poor data dictionaries were amongst the difficulties of the normalization of datasets, which varied according to the data sources. This was overcome through the creation of an integration, conversion and interoperability API, which allowed for data from different sources to be integrated into Explore.Porto.

The digital dimension assumes a central role in the development of the innovation. Digital public services that are provided by local authorities should be easily findable and accessible. That is the reason Explore.Porto was developed in a digital environment, encouraging people to use digital services. To do this, training of Porto Digital developers was required to take advantage of the supporting platforms Digitransit, PELIAS and Open Street maps, in which Explore.Porto was based. Moreover, to ensure the contribution of all partners, training sessions were held for page users to learn about the process of introducing new data into the platform. The non-digital support infrastructure is only used to reinforce communication, with automatic and quick identification of the physical point where the visitor is and the innovation strategy that seeks to combine the two realities.

There is a considerable interest from other European cities in adopting and adapting this platform to other urban environments. Explore.Porto is being developed in an open way for Explore.City, a platform that can be made available to other cities to adapt to their needs. Also noteworthy is the work that has been done in the context of the European network for smart cities (OASC), as well as in the European Commission’s “100 Intelligent Cities Challenge” initiative, which aims to support more than 100 European cities in the digital transition processes, and in which Porto is one of the 10 mentor cities, with the Explore.Porto project being one of the anchor projects in the work that the city is developing.

The lessons learned from the pandemic will impact the future development of the innovation. There is a motivation to integrate information from measurement systems for the occupation of public spaces and more detailed information on points of interest. Respecting the General Data Protection Regulation will allow citizens/visitors to make more conscious decisions. The impacts generated by greater confidence in information are an unquestionable benefit to strengthen the tourism sector in any city.

Business Intelligence is a key factor, as the innovation collects data and promotes efficiency in the provision of services with information in real time regarding:

• Itinerary suggestions
• Alerts on temporary changes in the operation of public transportation
• Identification of points of interest
• Selection of favorite routes or points of interest
• Exploration of points of interest with access to description, history, address and opening hours
• Categorization of points of interest