Why urban data exchanges are essential to AI-driven smart cities

Artificial intelligence promises to accelerate innovation and effectiveness within smart cities, enabling local governments to deliver on their objectives around sustainability, transparency, efficiency and citizen and business experience. 

However, AI depends on robust, reliable and easily-consumable data. This has to be available to all stakeholders, internally and externally in formats that are understandable and usable by both humans and machines, such as AI-driven digital twins. 

Delivering this data is essential to smart city success, and in its latest Hype Cycle, Gartner outlines the importance of urban data exchanges – data marketplaces focused on the smart city ecosystem – to providing a smooth, personalized and future-proofed experience for every stakeholder. The report includes Opendatasoft as a sample urban data exchange vendor and in this blog we explain how these marketplaces underpin current and future smart cities.

Cities face a wide range of challenges. They need to attract residents and businesses by providing an attractive environment, yet must successfully manage growth and operations to ensure that challenges such as pollution, congestion and waste management are overcome. At the same time they have to meet climate change and decarbonization goals, while optimizing their budgets to deliver the right services at the right price for taxpayers. All of this requires a strategic approach that brings together technology, process redesign and listening closely to stakeholder needs. 

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Smart City Technologies and Solutions 2025 provides a roadmap for the technologies required to deliver success. It highlights the importance of AI, data literacy and urban resilience to not only better manage existing operations, but to plan for the future through predictive digital twins and other data-driven insights. 

According to the report, current smart city initiatives are focusing on sustainability, social inclusion, more efficient mobility operations, building management, smart living and better management of governance. All of these priorities rely on data, AI and analytics embedded across the smart city ecosystem.

The Hype Cycle report outlines a wide range of technologies and programs at varying levels of maturity, impact and adoption. These include:

• Digital twins to deliver improved energy and water management, traffic management, urban planning and energy distribution
• Smart transportation services to reduce congestion and enable smart mobility, especially through predictive AI analytics
• Smart public services that increase efficiency and service levels through data-driven decision making, AI automation and faster responses to citizen requests
• Smart living through smart buildings and intelligent street poles that provide hubs for sensors, cameras and networks
• Circularity and urban mining to maximize the reuse of existing materials, reducing carbon footprints and increasing local opportunities
• Smart city regional governance, enabling collaboration with neighboring cities and areas to tackle joint challenges more effectively
• Smart city operational centers that bring together information from across multiple systems to enable real-time monitoring and decision-making
• Civic and community development through feedback and engagement platforms that highlight performance and understand the Voice of the Citizen
• Water management analytics, covering the availability of freshwater, monitoring for flood risks and wastewater control

All of these, along with future projects around autonomous and aerial vehicles rely on good, quality, reliable data. This needs to be available in real-time to human stakeholders and AI models and agents, leading to an increasing focus on urban data exchanges to enable this sharing.

Gartner outlines the importance of urban data exchanges, stating that, “data exchanges in intelligent urban ecosystems contextualize the sharing of data between smart-city stakeholders and the industry for public value and societal benefit.”

Developed from commercial and open data marketplaces, urban data exchanges provide a central space that brings together data and makes it available for public and private use cases, releasing its value to all. They increase public trust, transparency and widen the use of data, driving innovation. Our recent blog on the Australian public sector outlined a wide range of these use cases, from arts and culture to business planning and traffic management.

Urban data exchanges are classed as having a transformational impact and are currently in the emerging section of the Hype Cycle, with their widespread deployment expected in between just 2-5 years.  For the second year running, Opendatasoft is included as a sample vendor in the Hype Cycle’s urban data exchange category.

Drivers for their use include: 

• Providing more responsive services that react to unfolding events (such as congestion or bad weather) to mitigate the impacts on citizens and businesses
• Sharing data across the urban ecosystem, combining public information with business and industry datasets to provide context and depth
• Supporting communities and businesses with relevant data to encourage entrepreneurship, engagement and innovation
• Monetizing data through partnerships with organizations in sectors such as utilities, automotive, real estate or retail, creating new revenues and enabling them to deploy new services
• Demonstrating and monitoring progress towards sustainability targets in areas such as air quality, carbon emissions, energy efficiency, and biodiversity

As well as delivering data for use cases now, urban data exchanges are the essential foundation of predicted future smart city projects. These include the Citiverse, a metaverse-style concept of a single or a network of linked virtual worlds synchronized with their physical counterparts. It enables citizens and tourists opportunities to engage with services like administrative and cultural activities, and virtual environments, while offering new opportunities to businesses. The Citiverse allows local authorities to improve decision-making by providing a space to test policies, predict outcomes through AI and optimize urban scenarios.

Key success factors for urban data exchanges

Urban data exchanges are at the heart of successful smart cities. However, simply creating a space for data is not enough to drive usage – platforms need to offer the right capabilities to stakeholders, data owners and administrators.

Stakeholders 

Urban data exchanges are used by a broad range of audiences, from residents and businesses to researchers, internal city staff and AI models. Many of these are not data experts, meaning that information has to be available in the right format for their needs, and be discoverable through self-service. 

Urban data marketplaces therefore need to have an intuitive, e-commerce marketplace-style experience that enables users to quickly discover relevant data, and then provide it in an understandable, consumable way. These could include through focused data products, or other visualizations or dashboards. For internal users the ability to connect and access data through their existing tools, such as spreadsheets, is also vital to drive adoption. All of these capabilities will help build trust, encourage usage and accelerate the rise of data literacy amongst stakeholders.

Data owners

Clearly, urban data exchanges have to be comprehensive and offer a wide range of data if they are to attract users. That means administrators have to convince data owners, in both the public and private sector, to share their data. 

This relies on demonstrating the value that it brings, both to the ecosystem and themselves. Capabilities such as data lineage, which shows where data has been used, and by whom, encourages greater sharing, as does the ability to easily collaborate with users and collect their feedback via the platform.

Administrators

There is an enormous volume and variety of data within the smart city ecosystem. At the same time cities often have limited resources to manage urban data exchanges. That means platforms must be simple to manage, without requiring in-depth training, in order to maximize efficiency and productivity. They have to be able to seamlessly connect to a wide range of data sources, as well as to feed into other systems through APIs. To ensure trust and compliance they must also meet strict governance processes, including managing access to potentially sensitive data, enabling anonymization, and protecting personal information.

The world is rapidly urbanizing, which brings a range of challenges to cities and municipalities. They need to become more resilient, sustainable and appealing to residents, visitors and businesses while increasing efficiency and automation. The rise of AI brings new opportunities to predict and react to real-time and future events, increasing liveability and creating new innovative services. However, success relies on strong data foundations through comprehensive urban data exchanges that underpin collaborative, citizen-focused ecosystems.

Learn more about Opendatasoft’s capabilities on our smart cities page.