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Use what helps your team. These examples, walkthroughs and design ideas support the three success criteria on the challenge page. They do not add requirements or scoring items. Choose your own municipality or region inside the Province of Antwerp. You are free to choose your own data sources and tools. The Schoten KBO sample is optional.

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Officer context

Municipalities lack a reliable view of the businesses actually active on their territory. The federal business register — the KBO (Kruispuntbank van Ondernemingen) — lists companies that stopped trading long ago as active, misses shops that are visibly open, and buries the local economy under dormant registrations and side activities. One municipality of about 20,000 residents counted roughly 33,000 register entries.

"One of our biggest problems is simply knowing which businesses are actually active in our municipality." — a local economy officer in the province

Officers fill the gaps with street visits, Google searches and paid data brokers.

• Marleen cross-checks records by hand, in Excel, between emails. Outreach can miss new shops or reach businesses that have closed.
• Tom pays a commercial data provider to fill the gap and pulls the results into his own database. He wants to compare public sources and see how the tool reached its conclusion.

Enterprise or establishment?

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Enterprise and establishment: two different records

An enterprise (onderneming) is the legal entity: a company, an association or a sole trader with a registry number. An establishment unit (vestigingseenheid) is a physical place where that enterprise operates: a shop, an office, a workshop. One enterprise can have several establishments, in several municipalities, and its registered seat may be somewhere else entirely.

Distinguish between a business's local establishments and its enterprise record and registered seat. Both matter. Establishments help officers understand activity on the ground; enterprise information helps identify the organisation behind them and the appropriate contact, which may be based elsewhere. Keep these records connected and make their relationship clear (in the starter data: column Ondernemingsnr_maatsch_zetel). Legal status, bankruptcy and dissolution are recorded on the enterprise, not on the establishment.

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Optional worked example

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"Welke ondernemingen zijn actief in deze straat, en waarop baseren we dat?"

Which businesses are active in this street, and what do we base that on?

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Show each address with a status, dated evidence and an uncertainty marker. This fictional example uses the officer's language:

The officer ticks bevestigen or afwijzen per row; only confirmed changes leave the tool.

Optional contact view for this fictional example: When the officer opens Bakkerij Voorbeeld, the tool could show any available phone number or email, whether it belongs to the local establishment or central office, a clickable source and when it was checked. If the contact is at a central office elsewhere, show how it connects to the local establishment and enterprise. If no contact is known, display contactgegevens onbekend rather than inventing details. Finding the right contact is a useful feature; no specific contact fields are mandatory.

Optional starter materials

The shared Starter Files & Source Guide contains the ZIP, complete inventory, field descriptions, provenance, licence notes and known gaps. Its KBO folder has an optional sample of 1,000 Schoten records; you may use, adapt or replace it.

If you follow the walkthrough below, read the sample's notes first: it mixes legal entities and establishments, is incomplete, has sparse activity fields and some suspect coordinates, and does not state the exact underlying federal snapshot date. Other maps, listings, permit records or websites may need their own access; no external API keys are supplied.

A suggested first 35 minutes

A suggestion to get moving — not a minimum requirement and not a scoring threshold.