Frequently asked questions

Questions and answers

What is Hubbcast Smart City?

Municipal resilience software built on public data and open standards. Four surfaces are built: this public site, the Bağcılar decision-support demonstrator, and a Saku municipality workspace and Saku citizen view built only from Estonian and European public data.

Is it a digital twin?

No. “Digital twin” is not a description of this platform. The Saku workspace is a common operating picture and a decision-support demonstrator; the Bağcılar surface is a decision-support demonstrator on seeded data. Neither maintains a synchronised model of a physical city.

What data does the Saku pilot use?

Only public data, from named providers under stated licences: official weather warnings and observations from Riigi Ilmateenistus and Keskkonnaagentuur; the official Saku boundary, its settlements, the ETAK layers and the national base map from Maa- ja Ruumiamet; the Copernicus EFFIS fire-weather index and the Statistikaamet population grid as P1 additions.

Is the data live?

Weather observations and official warnings are LIVE values: fetched from the public upstream on request, cached for no more than ten minutes, and shown with both the upstream timestamp and our retrieval time. When an upstream cannot be reached, the last good value is shown as stale, in amber, with the minutes since it was retrieved. Map layers are dated snapshots rather than live feeds.

Does Saku Municipality use it?

No. Saku Municipality has not used, validated or endorsed this workspace, and nothing in it is a municipal record. No data has been requested from Saku, and no agreement exists with Saku or with any other institution.

What is the Bağcılar demonstrator?

A six-page decision-support demonstrator for a dense urban district — inventory, register, services, scenarios and analytics — in Turkish, English and Estonian. It runs on seeded demonstration data, it is not a municipal system of record, and it does not use real Bağcılar data.

Are the scenario results forecasts?

No. The flood, fire and wind-storm models in the demonstrator are illustrative and uncalibrated. Their outputs are labelled SIMULATED, they are not forecasts, they estimate nothing about a real event, and they appear on no Saku surface.

Which open standards does it use?

OGC WMS and OGC WFS for consuming the Estonian national geoportal's own services; GeoJSON (RFC 7946) and CSV (RFC 4180) for output; WGS84 (EPSG:4326) for storage and Estonian L-EST97 (EPSG:3301) for the services consumed; ADS/EHAK settlement codes from the national register. The standards page sets out each one, with what is not claimed for it.

Is there vendor lock-in?

The running stack is open source end to end — Laravel, Vue, PostgreSQL with PostGIS, nginx and Docker — with no proprietary map service and no proprietary database. Public datasets stay re-importable from the public URLs they came from, so the working set can be rebuilt from the original sources rather than recovered from us.

Who can sign in?

People Hubbcast has provisioned an account for. There is one role per account, and it decides which surface that account reaches: the demonstrator operator role, the Saku municipality, decision-maker and rescue roles, the Saku citizen role, and a platform administrator. There is no self-service registration and no password reset.

How is personal data handled?

The resident records in the demonstrator are seeded demonstration data and not real people. That register is masked by default, and the unmasked record is behind a sign-in restricted to the operator and administrator roles. The Saku surfaces hold no citizen data at all; the one exception is a single home location a citizen account may save for itself, stored server-side and private to that account.

Where does it run?

In one Docker container on a single virtual machine, against one PostgreSQL database with PostGIS, behind Cloudflare. The exact hosting region is not published.

What is the maturity level?

TRL 5 — validated in a relevant environment, with a live municipal demonstration deployment. That deployment is the Bağcılar demonstrator, running on seeded demonstration data. No higher technology readiness level is claimed.

Which languages are supported?

The Bağcılar demonstrator is in Turkish, English and Estonian. The Saku surfaces are Estonian by default with an English toggle. This public site is English only for this delivery.

Does it send alerts?

No. The system does not send SMS messages, push notifications or e-mail alerts, it is not connected to EE-ALARM or to any other national alert system, and it dispatches nothing to anybody. Official warnings are displayed, with their source and timestamps, and that is the whole of it. The citizen alert preview renders text on screen only and is permanently labelled a demonstration.

How can a municipality try it?

The demonstrator is open to anyone — no account is needed to read it. For a workspace built on your own public data, write to the address on the contact page and say which municipality you are asking about.