The Senate Department for Economic Affairs, Energy & Operations wanted to approach the evaluation potential of Berlin’s commercial data through a deliberately open project approach. Accordingly, potential users from the districts and the Senate Department were actively involved in the conception process during the first phase of the project in order to find out what challenges and limitations existed in the current use of the trade data and what requirements the users would place on an analysis application so that it would actually support them in their work processes.

Based on these findings, the pilot application was then developed in two iteration phases in close coordination with the customer. It was then presented to the stakeholders to obtain additional feedback and to agree on possible focal points for further development of the application.

Due to the positive feedback and the good applicability of the evaluations, the Senate Department is aiming to expand the pilot project.

The evaluations in the pilot application are based on non-personal data on trades registered in Berlin from the Migewa trade database. These data were georeferenced to make them usable for spatial analyses. To provide additional context, data from the Berlin-Brandenburg Statistics Office on turnover and number of employees per industry were also integrated.

The pilot application offers comprehensive evaluations of the currently and historically registered businesses in Berlin across industries and spatial categories. The solution was validated with employees of the Senate Administration as well as with economic developers and urban development experts from Berlin’s districts. Potential users saw added value in the ability to communicate quickly and in detail with politicians and citizens and to respond to inquiries. The application also offered users access to business data that they had not previously included in their work processes.

The success of economic development programs, the consequences of the Corona pandemic on certain sectors of the economy, or conspicuous clusters of identical business registrations in small-scale observation areas can also be analyzed and elaborated via the application. In a further development step, the integration of further data sets is to be examined, which, for example, additionally. In a further development step, the integration of additional data sets will be examined, which could, for example, add information on the size or number of employees of the listed companies.

An integration of the application into Berlin’s Open Data Portal is also to be examined.