Smart City Urban Data Platform Jena

🔄 Ongoing

📍 Jena, Thuringia, Germany

About

🗓️ Start: 2020-12-01
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A production-grade urban data platform deployed across the City of Jena, integrating heterogeneous sensor networks, public transport telemetry, traffic signal infrastructure and open geodata into a unified, standards-based data space. The platform underpins multiple smart city services and open data provision.

Short Description

Acronym: Smart City UDP Jena

Stage: Ongoing

Key goal: To enable the City of Jena to break down urban data silos by connecting IoT sensors, municipal IT systems, public transport and open data sources into a coherent, GDPR-compliant and interoperable data infrastructure operated under city sovereignty.

Participants:

  • Data In Motion: architecture, implementation and operations
  • City of Jena: data steward, infrastructure operator and governance

Pilot Overview

Jena is a city of about 111 000 inhabitants in Thuringia, Germany. Its urban data was distributed across incompatible systems (municipal databases, proprietary sensor platforms, public transport control systems and ad hoc open data sources) without a unified access layer, governance framework or semantic interoperability. The city took part in Germany’s Model Projects Smart Cities (MPSC) programme and the BMVI 5G Innovation Programme, which created an opportunity to build a reference implementation for open, interoperable urban data infrastructure.

The central challenge was not only technical integration, but establishing a sustainable, city-operated data infrastructure that could grow as new data sources and use cases emerged, without creating new vendor dependencies.

Challenges Addressed

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  • Integration of heterogeneous sensors and systems
  • Semantic data quality and consistency across sources
  • GDPR-compliant data governance for personal and sensitive urban data
  • Long-term city data sovereignty, without cloud vendor lock-in
  • Interoperability with German and EU data standards (DCAT, OGC, NGSI-LD)

Solutions Tested

AI-Driven Urban Data Analytics Platform

🛠️ Tool
By developing purpose driven and longtime-sustainable solutions Data in Motion’s mission is to improve people’s lives directly and with lasting impact. Based on open-source solutions, we want to unleash the potential of urban data to make interactions between citizens and administrations easier, increase data transparency and accessibility, make traffic safer and more efficient and transform city infrastructures into healthier and climate friendly environments.

The platform combines an open-source stack built around Eclipse Foundation projects:

  • Eclipse sensiNact as the IoT data broker. It ingests sensor data via LoRaWAN (The Things Network and ChirpStack), MQTT, HTTP/REST, AMQP, CoAP and public transport telemetry, and exposes all data through the OGC SensorThings API. It is deployed at the edge, directly on traffic signal hardware, so data is processed close to the source without replacing infrastructure.
  • Model Atlas as the semantic model registry. All data structures are managed as versioned data models, enabling automated mapping to NGSI-LD, DCAT-AP.de and OGC Feature standards and ensuring type-safe, validated data throughout the pipeline.
  • Model-driven privacy for GDPR compliance. Orthogonal privacy models classify data sensitivity automatically, enforce filtering and masking by role, and generate GDPR-compliant audit trails through the Digital Notary component.
  • Eclipse Daanse for analytics and dashboards. OLAP-based multidimensional analysis supports operational monitoring and planning in energy, transport and environment.
  • Kubernetes-based deployment on city-owned cloud infrastructure. The platform is horizontally scalable and infrastructure-sovereign, and is monitored with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and Grafana.

Current Status

The core platform has been in production operation in Jena since 2021. All sensor integrations listed above are live. The open data catalogue is published automatically to the city’s Piveau instance (DCAT-AP.de compliant). The platform continues to be extended with new features, sensor integrations and operator-facing improvements.

Next steps:

  • Continuous integration of additional sensor systems and data sources, expanding the platform’s coverage across municipal operations
  • Ongoing improvements to operator tools and workflows for city staff, including dashboards, access management and day-to-day monitoring interfaces
  • Extended OpenTelemetry observability across all platform components

Achieved Results

  • A unified OGC SensorThings API across all municipal IoT sensors, covering multiple device types and data sources across several LoRaWAN gateways
  • Live telemetry from Jena’s bus and tram fleet
  • A model-based GDPR compliance layer with an automated audit trail
  • Automated open data publication through a DCAT-AP.de pipeline
  • A scalable Kubernetes deployment on city-owned infrastructure with 24/7 monitoring
  • Integration of traffic count detectors and OCIT-C traffic signal data into the unified platform
  • Platform architecture aligned with BSI TR-03187, the technical guideline for smart city data infrastructure

Innovators

🧠 Data
🇩🇪 Germany

Data in Motion

Data In Motion develops modular, open-source software for cities and organisations working to make heterogeneous data sources interoperable — from IoT sensor networks and traffic infrastructure to compliance-critical enterprise systems. Our solutions are built around a shared model layer that gives every integrated source a computable, queryable representation, turning data integration from a custom engineering effort into a governed, repeatable process.
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