Parse official sources
Statistical institutes, ministries, electoral commissions, open data portals. We read them at the source — no intermediaries, no stale scrapes.
Vivid · public data, made human
Closing the gap between public data and human experience.
Governments publish an enormous amount of open data. Most of it never reaches the people who would find it valuable. Vivid is building the machine that parses official sources, tracks how places change over time, and ships the sites and stories on top.
Japan edition shipping this week.
1
site live — codegeo.fr
~36k
French communes mapped, across mergers & splits
2nd
country shipping this week — Japan
∞
datasets we'd like to make usable
The problem
Open data is everywhere, and almost nowhere useful.
Every government in the world now publishes gigabytes of open data: election results, budgets, demographics, crime, transport, schools. Publishers put real effort in. But the moment you try to use it — compare one city across years, build a simple chart, launch a website — you hit a wall.
Formats change. Schemas drift. IDs aren't stable. And the single hardest part: places themselves change. Cities are created, renamed, merged, split, moved between districts. Without a clean map of those changes, every chart lies a little.
That "boring" plumbing is exactly what blocks most open-data reuse. So we're building it.
What we're building
The machine
A pipeline that reads official government sources and outputs a clean, versioned, queryable map of places and the data attached to them.
Map the territory, over time
Countries, regions, districts, cities, sub-city divisions. And every creation, deletion, merger and rename, so historical data lines up with today's map.
Attach the datasets
Elections, demographics, budgets, whatever fits. Linked to stable place IDs so a chart across ten years actually tells the truth.
Ship the sites
Templates turn the structured output into fast, readable, SEO-friendly websites — one per topic, per country, per city.
What we've shipped
First results from the machine
Live
codegeo.fr
Every French commune, département and region, with stable codes, historical changes, and the first datasets plugged in — starting with election results aggregated across years.
Visit codegeo.fr →
This week
Japan edition
Prefectures, municipalities and their history, mapped from official Japanese sources. Same machine, second country.
Launching soon
Next
More countries & datasets
Once the pipeline is clean, adding a country is mostly a matter of pointing it at the right official sources. Requests welcome.
Use case in the wild
Election results across twenty years, per city
A concrete example of what the machine unlocks: take every French election result for the last two decades, attach it to the right commune even when that commune didn't exist back then, and you can finally ask simple questions —
- Is this city drifting left or right?
- What's the turnout trend where I live?
- Which municipalities swung hardest between two elections?
Looks simple. Isn't, until someone has done the plumbing. That's the whole point.
Market & opportunity
The data is published. The value is still waiting.
A decade of open data policy has produced an enormous stockpile of official information. The market for turning it into something people actually use — sites, analytics, stories, services — is growing fast, and still wide open.
€194B
projected direct open data market in the EU by 2025.
European Data Portal · The Economic Impact of Open Data (2020)
$3T/yr
estimated global value potential across seven sectors if open data were fully exploited.
McKinsey Global Institute (2013)
1.8M+
datasets catalogued on data.europa.eu alone, from every EU member state.
data.europa.eu
The gap between what's published and what's used is still huge. Studies keep pointing to the same bottleneck: not the availability of data, but the plumbing needed to clean it, align it across sources and years, and put it in front of non-technical audiences.
That's the space Vivid is building into — and why we think a patient, boring, well-built machine beats another dashboard startup.
Where this could go
We're still figuring out the shape of the business.
We're honest about it: the market isn't fixed yet. Here are the three directions we think are worth exploring.
Many small, useful sites
Hundreds or thousands of focused pages around real questions people already search for — elections, schools, transport, local budgets. Ad-supported, SEO-native.
Services for data publishers
Ministries and agencies spend real effort publishing open data. We help it get used — clean pipelines, visible reuse, dashboards that don't break every schema change.
Publish the primitives
The versioned place maps and connectors are useful on their own. We'd like to make parts of them public, so others can build on top.
Get in touch
Building the machine. Talk to us while it's early.
Whether you're a data publisher, a journalist, a researcher, or just someone who wishes a particular open dataset was easier to use — we'd like to hear from you.