Smart Cities SIG
Bridging municipal operations and open standards for smarter, interoperable cities
The Smart Cities Special Interest Group (SIG) is a collaborative, implementation-neutral initiative facilitated by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and originated by Madrid Digital. We bring together municipalities, standards organizations, industry, and academia to address the real interoperability challenges facing smart city deployments — starting from operational reality, not standards theory.
Our initial phase runs from May to November 2026, targeting the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. All outputs are open, permanent, and reusable.
Why Interoperability Matters
Reduce Fragmentation
Aligned, not siloed
Coordinate interoperability approaches across municipalities without replacing or competing with existing standards organizations.
Reusable Outputs
Built to be shared
Develop semantic mappings, requirements, and use cases that any city or ecosystem partner can adopt and extend.
Collaborative Model
Open participation
Cities, standards bodies, industry partners, and academic institutions working together on shared challenges.
Initial Focus Areas
We start where the interoperability gap is most visible — two domains actively deployed by municipal partners today.
Public Street Lighting
Urban Infrastructure
Understanding what Lux, lumens, and watts actually mean across municipal contexts — and how to exchange that data reliably between systems and vendors.
Smart Water Metering
Water & Utilities
Mapping water monitoring operational requirements to interoperable data models, grounded in the real needs of municipal deployments.
Three-Stage Methodology
Our approach transforms municipal operational reality into reusable interoperability outputs — without prescribing vendor solutions or deployment architectures.
Operational Meaning
Where we begin
Understand what municipalities are actually trying to achieve before any standards mapping or schema design begins. Preserve the original intent.
Reusable Abstractions
What we extract
Extract generalizable interoperability requirements from operational needs that transcend specific deployments and implementations.
Standards Mapping
How we align
Map requirements to existing standards, semantic models, and ecosystem initiatives — including OMA LwM2M, FIWARE, and Smart Data Models.
Who Should Participate?
The SIG is open to any organization with a genuine interest in smart city interoperability. There are no fees — participation is based on contribution.
Cities & Municipalities
Public Sector
Share real operational requirements, validate findings, and gain reusable interoperability guidance for live deployments.
Standards Organizations
SDOs & Consortia
Contribute standards expertise and receive grounded municipal requirements that improve real-world standards alignment.
Industry Partners
Vendors & Integrators
Understand real interoperability challenges and contribute implementation-neutral expertise to shared outputs.
Academic Institutions
Research & Education
Apply semantic interoperability research to real-world municipal data challenges and co-author reusable deliverables.