With this project, the City of Gent develops an online market platform where the citizens and visitors of Ghent can order urban services. The aim is to have an easily accessible and recognizable online urban marketplace where they can order, reserve, and pay a wide range of urban services. The project focuses on the cultural, physical and educational activities offered by the Sports Service, the Educational Services and the City Museums.

These services are already highly digitized. The current fragmented approach is not future-proof. We would like to have a solution that is flexible and agile in times of major changes such as the covid-19 crisis. In this project, we develop one large market place, built on a central, easily expandable and modular open architecture. With this ORB tool as a case study, the City of Ghent takes the next big step towards a completely modular IT architecture.