Christchurch City Council has deployed MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to build a series of system integrations and open data APIs that will enable government agencies and third parties access to provide richer experiences to citizens. By securely exposing historical city data to approved third parties and agencies citizens will benefit from the release of innovative new products and services.

As the local government authority for the New Zealand city of Christchurch, the Council provides a range of services for more than 375,000 residents. Focused on maintaining the social, economic and cultural well-being of the city, the Council delivers everything from public transport and sports facilities to construction approvals and disaster recovery services.

The Council released its first open data API created using Anypoint Platform in June 2017. The “Property Data API,” unlocks data historically siloed in the Council’s internal property data warehouses and makes it easy for real estate agencies, researchers, application developers and other government departments to access historical property information including sales and pricing data. By making this data accessible to third parties, citizens will be able to more readily access insights on property ownership over time.

For example, a property sales agency can now leverage the Property Data API to show historical pricing of properties on their website or similar properties in the area to give potential homebuyers a point of comparison before purchase. Other third parties, such as researchers could combine this with other datasets to allow for new insights and enhanced decision making.

Previously, external parties seeking access to these records had to email their request to the Council and were then provided with a CSV file containing the records manually drawn from an SQL database. Requests can now be made with a simple API call, reducing the time it takes to fulfil these requests to seconds. Taking an API-led approach also makes it easier for third parties to gain access to the data they need in more widely compatible formats.

“By creating an application network through API-led connectivity, we’re able to quickly serve up data required by third party companies to deliver digital experiences to Christchurch Citizens and can invite outside organisations to plug into our network to drive even further innovation. Since launching the open data API program, we’ve already seen many organisations jump at the chance to access this data and use it to start delivering cutting-edge services to our citizens,” said Adrian Dawson, Christchurch City Council Service Manager.

Since completing the Property Data API, the Council's IT team has also created a B2B service that streamlines the way in which work requests are sent to road construction contractors. During the next 12 months, the Council plans to use Anypoint Platform to further improve citizen experiences by creating other open data APIs such as an API to expose cemetery data to support genealogy research and an API traffic flow data to assist with the introduction of self-driving cars.

"The potential for innovation is limitless when the right data is accessible. Christchurch citizens will continue to benefit from the new offerings other agencies and organisations are able to launch as a result of these open data APIs,” said Dawson.

"We carefully considered a range of integration solutions but it became clear MuleSoft was the best fit for our requirements," says Dawson. "Of the wide range of enterprise capabilities offered by Anypoint Platform, we were particularly impressed by MuleSoft’s full API lifecycle management offering, which we knew would help us to open up our data quickly and securely."