Comment le département du Gard conjugue Modern Data Stack et Géomatique ?

The Gard Department is a territorial authority that employs nearly 3,000 agents. Every day, they serve the general interest in various fields: health and social action, departmental roads, middle schools, very high-speed broadband, ...

Through this action, Gard consumes and produces large quantities of data daily that the Department, through its Innovation and Information Systems Directorate, wishes to enhance. With this in mind, a study was conducted among territorial peers and more broadly within the data ecosystem to attempt to identify the state of the art and define a roadmap.

This study showed that the Modern Data Stack is widely spreading both in large groups and in smaller companies. Dedicated sites, podcasts, communities and conferences praise its merits. However, while this approach seems to be unanimous, few implementations are found in local authorities: would the Modern Data Stack not be adapted to the challenges of territorial civil service?

A local authority is first and foremost a territory. As such, the data we handle is largely geolocated:

are there accident-prone areas that would require changes to the road layout? where are the populations that need help the most and how should we distribute our staff across the territory? what is the most relevant location to build the future middle school considering the location of students? Therefore, the stack must be geographical! With this constraint established, which tools should be selected to build our Modern Data Stack?

This talk will present the stack implemented at the Gard Department and the reasons that led to making these choices. We will see in particular that while some reference building blocks, including DBT, perform well with geographical data, others struggle to keep up, giving way to tools less known in data science but widely used by geomaticians. We will also see some use cases that will illustrate the contribution of geography for data analysis and decision support. Finally, we will conclude on the evolution perspectives of our stack and our organization.