The digital archive challenge of the Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna

Challenge

In 2020, the Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna began a vast dematerialization process of the building practice archive, consisting of various documents collected over nearly a century from about ten archival funds of the involved Municipalities. The numbers speak for themselves: 227,000 dematerialized practices, over 3.5 million files produced, over 12 million images acquired in recent years.

The Unione collaborated with EROI, the Emilia-Romagna Region's Open Innovation platform, to further enhance the dematerialized document assets and meet the new needs of entities, businesses, and citizens. Specifically, the Unione aims to:

• activate new search and consultation services for practices
• analyze the data contained in the documents to enrich the digital database of building practices
• build new territorial policies based on data

The Challenge launched by the Unione on EROI aims to identify experts in data analysis and extraction from digital documents, artificial intelligence, data analysis, big data, and integrations with other digital tools, platforms, and/or new technologies.

Solution

The Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna turned to the EROI platform to meet with various stakeholders. The engagement process with the community of innovators on EROI involved the following steps:

• publication of a Challenge by the Unione on the EROI platform
• promotion of the Challenge by the EROI, ER2Digit, and ART-ER network
• collection of solutions proposed by the EROI community
• organization of 1-1 meetings between the Unione and solution proposers

The action carried out through the EROI platform allowed the Unione to meet several specialized technical stakeholders, particularly IT sector companies with a portfolio of innovative solutions.

Topics such as the technical feasibility of the Challenge, the reliability of automated reading tools and metadata extraction from files, the possibility of integrating these tools with the entity's current systems, data security, and compliance with Italian and European regulations on the management and storage of personal data were explored.

During the meetings, the Unione also assessed the opportunity to introduce artificial intelligence systems for the design of new services dedicated to internal and external users.

Results

Thanks to EROI's open innovation process, the Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna was able to acquire new information on the enhancement of data contained in building archives.

The various types of companies consulted during the interactions on EROI offered the Unione several operational proposals that could contribute to the achievement of the set objectives: an increasingly intelligent and accessible dematerialized archive.

Information

Find out your nearest EDIH and learn more about ER2Digit service catalogue for Public Sector Organisations and SMEs located in Emilia-Romagna.

Photo: Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna | Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal - Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0)