analytics.brussels. This is the name of the new economic data visualisation platform of hub.brussels, the Brussels Agency for Business Support. Financed by the European ERDF funds and created within the hub.brussels Living Lab, the tool allows companies, decision-makers, journalists and citizens to access a series of popularised and formatted data on the economic vitality of Brussels in real time. A short explanation.
The hub.brussels platform makes available, for example, consumption profiles in the capital's various shopping districts, the balance sheet of Brussels' international exports and the rate of bankruptcy and business start-ups in Brussels. "hub.brussels confirms the Region's commitment to greater transparency, by making a whole series of public utility data accessible," explains Barbara Trachte, Secretary of State for Economic Transition.
Thanks to its business register and the figures on the number of people visiting shopping districts, hub.brussels provides essential information for retailers, future retailers, municipalities and many other economic players.
The ambition behind analytics.brussels? To enable entrepreneurs to better understand the reality of the Brussels fabric through an ergonomic and accessible tool. They can, for example, analyse whether their location district meets their traffic projections, whether the current commercial rent is in line with district standards, or carry out a comparative analysis of the competition in several different districts.
"With the provision of maps, graphs and reports popularised in three languages (French, Dutch and English), we want the platform to become a practical decision-making tool, accessible to anyone at any time, regardless of the user's technical level," explains Annelore Isaac, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at hub.brussels.
The tool should also make it possible to monitor the economic attractiveness of Brussels and to evaluate the impact of public policies on the vitality of the entrepreneurial fabric. Mainly focused on local trade and foreign trade today, the platform will be enriched over time with new data stores and new analysis reports (data related to mobility in the districts, barometers of female entrepreneurship in Brussels, etc.).
In a few figures, analytics.brussels gathers more than 8 million lines of information on commercial activity in Brussels, which are collected, analysed and updated on a daily basis by a team of 10 researchers (analysts, geomaticians, sociologists, etc.) and some twenty workers in the field. The team's tasks include an annual inventory of the 25,000 shops in Brussels; it also conducts more than 4,000 surveys of Brussels users and records the flows of more than 7.5 million passers-by each year. Thanks to the analytics technology, the data collected in situ by hub.brussels employees are directly updated on the web platform. The platform, for which a
user guide is available, is accessible via
analytics.brussels.
