As an early adopter and practical partner during the research phase, the city of Essen has been instrumental in shaping the KomMonitor design to meet the comprehensive monitoring needs of municipal users. Essen has relied on the web-based open-source KomMonitor application as its technical solution for implementing small-scale social monitoring for many years and remains an active co-developer of the software.

On behalf of the City of Essen, the Essener Systemhaus contracted 52°North to enhance the KomMonitor system. This extension was driven by the need to incorporate nominal features for indicators and indices developed for the Essen social area monitoring. Additionally, the project should improve accessibility for users with limited GIS expertise by expanding the available data export options. These three key developments are the focus of the project’s work.

• Nominal Data Visualization: Adding support for various visualization options for nominal data.
• Data Classification and Visualization: Developing new functionality to classify data and providing corresponding visualizations.
• Export Functionality: Creating additional export capabilities for KomMonitor.