MK:Smart Data Hub

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-06

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means

MK:Smart ran 2014–2017 on £8m from HEFCE's Catalyst Fund plus matched funding from a consortium led by the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute. Its central artefact, the MK Data Hub, pooled council, sensor, satellite and socio-economic data on energy, transport and water. The portal still answers in 2026 and counts 831 datasets — but its newest one is dated January 2022, and the pages that list them return server errors.

Completed 📅 2014–2017

Outcome📉 Scaled back

Evidence• No measured figure

Run byThe Open University (Knowledge Media Institute)

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Cost£16M at launch (£8M HEFCE Catalyst Fund)

FundingHEFCE Catalyst Fund plus consortium match funding

🎓 Lesson

A platform staying online is not the same as a platform being kept. The MK:Smart brand still publishes news under the Open University and the city council; the hub it was built around has gone four years without a new dataset, and its own catalogue pages no longer load.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Sensors & IoT Smart grid & energy

Sources

↗ Business MK (press)Carries the funding sentence verbatim: £8m HEFCE Catalyst Fund grant, match funded by an Open University-led consortium; names the 14 partner organisations and OU KMi's Enrico Motta as project director.

↗ MK Data Hub (the portal itself)Checked 2026-08-06: landing page renders, counters read 831 datasets across 6 collections, newest dataset dated 24 January 2022. The /datasets/ and /collections/ listing pages both returned HTTP 500; the sibling domain mkdatahub.org returned 503.

↗ MK:Smart programme site (Open University / Milton Keynes City Council)The operator's current site: describes the three-year programme launched in 2014 as continuing, with news items through 27 January 2025 — and does not mention the MK Data Hub anywhere.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇬🇧 Starship Autonomous Pavement Delivery Robots · Milton Keynes Same city, opposite trajectory: the grant-funded platform froze in 2022, the commercial delivery service kept scaling. 🇬🇧 CityVerve IoT Smart City Demonstrator · Manchester Same UK funded cohort, different decay: CityVerve's domain was sold on, MK's portal still answers but has had no new dataset since 2022. 🇬🇧 Bristol Is Open — Programmable City Network Testbed · Bristol Two survivors of the same cohort that only look alive: a dormant company in Bristol, a frozen catalogue in Milton Keynes.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains 📊 Open data guide 🏙️ Milton Keynes city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects 📖 Building performance standard (BPS)📖 District heating 📖 Open data

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “MK:Smart Data Hub” — Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/milton-keynes-mksmart-data-hub/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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