Montpellier Open Data Portal and Real-Time API

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-10

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 · What “source-checked” means

Montpellier's first data platform was an IBM Intelligent Operations Center deployed with the company's local research centre from 2010; the Métropole's own account is that it was stopped because the tool had not given satisfaction. What replaced it was assembled in pieces: a DKAN open-data catalogue for all 31 communes opened on 10 November 2016, and a FIWARE context broker exposed publicly as an API portal on 18 January 2023, serving live and historic data in the NGSIv2 and NGSI-LD models through a Kong gateway. The real-time side started with three feeds — Vélomagg bike availability, Ecocompteur cycle counts and car-park occupancy — and keeps history back to January 2023.

Live 📅 since 2016

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byMontpellier Méditerranée Métropole (catalogue built by BLUPROD; FIWARE broker deployed by Atos; IoT visualisation by Synox)

Scale🗺️ Regional

📊 Impact

The catalogue listed 943 datasets on 10 August 2026. Querying the portal's own API for each one, 939 resolve: 863 carry the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), 75 carry France's Licence Ouverte / Open Licence and 1 carries Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike — no dataset resolves without a named licence, and 4 listed records return 404. The Métropole also owns roughly twenty LoRa antennas as a private network and is aiming for full territorial coverage by 2026.

🎓 Lesson

Montpellier lands high on completeness and mid-table on permissiveness, and those are different questions. Every dataset names a licence, as in Montreal and Zurich; but the licence it names is overwhelmingly ODbL, a share-alike database licence that obliges reusers to publish enriched derivatives back under the same terms — an open licence with a string attached, where Montreal chose plain CC BY and Zurich mostly CC0. The Métropole's public-facing wording, 'toutes données et applications ont leur propre licence', undersells what the metadata actually shows.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government Sensors & IoT Connectivity & 5G

Sources

↗ Open Data Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole — Bienvenue sur le nouveau portail open dataAnnouncement of the DKAN portal opening on Thursday 10 November 2016, covering all 31 communes and consolidating the previously separate portals. Basis for yearStart 2016.

↗ Open Data Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole — Ouverture du portail API18 January 2023 opening of portail-api.montpellier.fr: Fiware as context broker, NGSIv2 and NGSI-LD data models, Kong as API gateway, and the three launch feeds (Vélomagg availability, Ecocompteur bike counts, real-time car-park spaces). The portal answered HTTP 200 on 10 August 2026.

↗ Portal dataset inventory and licence audit via the DKAN API (own count)Counted on 10 August 2026: package_list returns 943 dataset names; package_show for each returns 863 odc-odbl, 75 'open' (Licence Ouverte / Open Licence), 1 cc-by-sa, and 4 HTTP 404 (dossiers-information-mairie-antennes-relais, qualite-de-leau, obligations-legales-de-debroussaillement, zones-humides). No dataset resolves without a licence.

↗ Cerema, Fabric'O — Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, gouvernance des donnéesThe state technical agency's case study. Source for the IBM Intelligent Operations Center deployment from 2010 and the verbatim reason it ended — 'Ce premier projet a été arrêté car l'outil n'avait pas apporté satisfaction' — the 2014-2020 shift to a sovereign stack with Synox, the three interconnected platforms (FIWARE by Atos, So Dataviz by Synox, open-data platform by BLUPROD in 2016) and the ~20 LoRa antennas targeting full coverage by 2026.

↗ Open Data Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole — Présentation / Portail APIThe Métropole's own framing: 31 communes, DKAN, the ODbL share-alike obligation spelled out ('les données enrichies doivent être rendues disponibles à partir d'un lien ou d'une API facilement accessible depuis le service opéré'), and the catch-all footer line 'Toutes données et applications ont leur propre licence'.

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↗ transport.data.gouv.fr — Disponibilité en temps réel des vélos en libre-service Vélomagg de Montpellier (GBFS)Example of a live feed published onward to the national mobility data platform in GBFS format, updated every minute — evidence that the real-time layer is consumed outside the Métropole's own portal.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇫🇷 Paris Open Data Portal (Paris Data) · Paris The two big French municipal catalogues, both ODbL: Paris opened in 2011, Montpellier folded 31 communes into one portal in 2016. 🇩🇪 Cosma21 / [ui!] UrbanPulse Urban Data Platform · Frankfurt am Main Two cities that bought an urban data platform: Frankfurt still runs UrbanPulse, Montpellier scrapped IBM's and rebuilt on FIWARE. 🇫🇷 Open Data Nantes Métropole: A Catalogue Where Every Dataset Carries a Licence · Nantes Both French catalogues license every dataset — Nantes leads with the permissive Licence Ouverte, Montpellier with share-alike ODbL.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains 📊 Open data guide 🏙️ Montpellier city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects 📖 Open data 📖 Urban data platform (UDP)📖 LoRaWAN

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Montpellier Open Data Portal and Real-Time API” — Montpellier, France. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/montpellier-open-data/ (last verified 2026-08-10). Data: CC BY 4.0.

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

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