Portuguese software company Ubiwhere has created the Urban Platform to help cities prepare for the future with data and digitisation.

Through this, Ubiwhere is focusing on responding to urban challenges associated with sustainable development, emphasising its technology to have an actual and beneficial impact on people’s lives.

The Urban Platform’s accessibility and usability provide understandable information on several domains, from urban mobility and energy efficiency to air quality, as well as analytics and performance indicators with sustainability as the primary objective. Its application in the city of Guimarães in northern Portugal demonstrates its breadth and main strengths.

The platform provides Guimarães with a city dashboard that presents information, updated in real time, from different domains and several sources such as sensors, platforms services and even the citizens themselves. It supports features for operational activities such as faster response to road accidents, bidirectional communication with the community, traffic flow improvement and parking areas optimisation.

By integrating these sources of information and harmonising the data, the analysis opportunities are noticed in real time. An example is an analysis of how the organisation of an event – such as a sporting event or a concert – can impact traffic flow and parking occupancy in certain areas, as well as the air quality and noise levels there.

The platform solves the digitisation problems of Guimarães through an integrated approach that allows the city to integrate data through open and standard communication protocols and following its own agenda. With an effective digitalisation of public administration, the city benefits from holistic perspectives to measure the impact of the decisions made based on the aggregation and standardisation of information. Furthermore, the platform provides Guimarães with a digital twin that shows the real-time status of the city, fuelled by data from different sectors and sources.  

The city has used the platform to digitise public administration through the aggregation and normalisation of information, including demographic information of buildings and areas. In this way, the town enjoys credible informational data from multiple domains and sources on a single map, enabling real-time analysis and decision making as well as efficient urban planning.

The platform also provides international standard indicators on the quality of life and sustainability, through personalised dashboards and performance reports of the sustainable development goals, mostly centred on mobility, environment, tourism, energy and waste, which enables Guimarães to evaluate its performance over time and compare with other cities compliant with the ISO norm.

The collaboration between Ubiwhere and Guimarães has not stopped there and they are working together in the PT2020 City Catalyst project. The project is a catalyst for sustainable cities with the main objective to research, develop and validate a set of technologies and innovative services that can enhance integrated and effective urban management through specific contributions to urban platforms’ interoperability in an authentic context.

With this objective in mind, knowledge-sharing is enabled by infrastructure that stimulates the local and business communities. The adoption of City Catalyst results from solid technological dynamism, and its benefits for improvement increases the quality of life and services offered to the citizens.

The ambition of City Catalyst for the Urban Platform and Guimarães is synonymous with innovation. The aim is to address challenges identified by the municipality and transform them into economic development opportunities and create products and services.

The platform will be enriched with data harmonisation models, and the implementation of NGSI-LD, to ensure data interoperability and traceability, based on the open standard’s value propositions.

Within the City Catalyst scope, this will allow the municipality of Guimarães to integrate new data sources in the future, according to its needs and the digitalisation process implemented in the city. The whole concept designed by Ubiwhere demonstrates the city as a single ecosystem, based on four pillars: sustainable mobility, monitoring energy communities, centralising urban operational activities, and sustainability.

The project will enable the dynamic calculation of sustainability and quality of life indicators through data analysis functionalities and machine-learning technologies, contributing to data-based governance and the decision-making process.