Initial situation & problem definition

As part of the “Model Projects Smart Cities” funding program of the German Federal Ministry of Housing, Urban Development and Building (BMWSB), the city of Jena received a grant notification in September 2020 for a 90 percent funding on its project application “Jena digitizes, learns and shares. Our city creates and uses KNOWLEDGE”. The funding program is intended to support municipalities in sustainable, digital modernization. In the Smart Cities model projects, strategic and integrated smart city approaches are to be developed and tested as examples for German municipalities in order to create diverse learning examples for the entire range of the municipal landscape. The funded projects should generate added value for all municipalities in Germany. The digital technologies applied should not only benefit individual interests, but also the urban society as a community in the long term. Developed solutions should be scalable and replicable and lead to high applicability of results via knowledge transfer. In Jena, about 17.5 million euros are made available for this purpose over a period of seven years, which will be used in five fields of action.

The urban data platform “WISSENsAllmende” is the heart of the Smart City project and is being implemented in the field of action 1 “Digital infrastructure and data policy”. The goal is to develop a DIN SPEC 91357 compatible “Urban Data” platform suitable to manage and make accessible all “urban” data assets: internal/protected data, commercially accessible data, open data. The term Allmende (common property) defines the agenda in this case: The open data structure is intended to create trust in social processes and municipal decisions, and participation is to be facilitated by establishing an adequate infrastructure. The principle of “open by default” applies here, in compliance with data protection standards. The main tasks to be solved are as follows:

- Definition, creation and maintenance of metadata as well as the development and implementation of APIs for data retrieval based on it,

- Development/implementation of data imports/accesses or ETL processes for “arbitrary” data sources that are not known in advance either specifically or even conclusively in terms of type,

- Development/implementation of a stack of interfaces and evaluation tools for use cases not conclusively known in advance.

Solution approach & implementation

Fraunhofer FOKUS supports the city of Jena in implementing the goals of the sub-project WISSENsAllmende, contributing to the conceptual and software-related further development of urban data platforms and providing the results as open source.

The scientists will perform the following tasks during the project:

- Research/development services for the overall conception of the platform in a modular architecture, based on the piveau® platform developed by FOKUS and used by the EU.

- Development or customization of the required software components according to a mutual agreement case-by-case, whether the development is performed by FOKUS, by the city of Jena or by a third party to be determined by a call for proposals. All developed components must be provided as open-source software.

- Installation, setup and updating/integration support for new components of the overall system.

- Training for employees of the city of Jena in various technical, administrative and professional roles

- Consulting on all issues relevant to the success of the project

- Support for the cooperation with stakeholders in Jena (especially scientific institutions and businesses) as well as with other municipalities.