# Urban Open Platform for Borderless Smart Cities
## 3 Case Study of Tallinn and Helsinki
### Data Exchange Platform for the Cross-Border Region  
Local governments are more and more expected to be participatory, horizontal and collaborative with the help of digital technologies. For example, Lee & Lee [23] criticise the provider's viewpoint in provision of urban services where organisation structures are constructed for the convenience of administration, instead of citizen, thus making the service provision vertical (e.g., departments of mobility and environment and their databases are fully disconnected). Therefore, Tallinn and Helsinki (and Estonia and Finland, respectively) provide an interesting case, as their public sector databases are interconnected (in the case of Estonia) or there are plans to connect them (in the case of Finland), which makes inter and intracity data exchange possible. It should be noted that achieving this assumes a change in organisations' management practices and legal set-ups. While practically complex, especially when considering social and political resistance to change, it is not impossible. Though initiated top-down, Estonia as a country is an interesting example of the horizontal exchange of data, as there is close to full interoperability between public sector databases via the data-exchange layer X-Road, both within departments in one city and across all national cities. For example, the national population registry (which stems from the population registry of Tallinn) is fully integrated with all cities and other government actors in Estonia. Therefore, cities cannot keep their own population registries, as there is one live database for all residents in Estonia, and every municipality must integrate their services based on this central registry (e.g., registration of new or departing residents). It is important to note that X-Road is not extraordinary because of its technological features (there are plenty of similar-logic enterprise service bus platforms available) but mainly because it is a case of successful implementation, both organisationally and legally. Essentially, it is a rule-based approach, and all these rules need to be defined (e.g., who can make inquiries to the population and the other thousand databases and how). In this perspective, X-Road is used as a lighthouse solution throughout the article, indicating how the twin cities (Helsinki and Tallinn) could conceptually benefit from it [2,24]). The X-Road platform is shown in Figure 3. Briefly, in Estonia, over 3000 government sector (including all cities) databases are interlinked via the Internet using the transport layer. Inspired by X-Road ([[http://epl.delfi.ee/news/eesti/soome-votab-kasutusele-meie-x-tee-susteemi?id=67359844](http://epl.delfi.ee/news/eesti/soome-votab-kasutusele-meie-x-tee-susteemi?id=67359844)]([http://epl.delfi.ee/news/eesti/soome-votab-kasutusele-meie-x-tee-susteemi?id=67359844](http://epl.delfi.ee/news/eesti/soome-votab-kasutusele-meie-x-tee-susteemi?id=67359844)), accessed on 9 November 2021 (in Estonian)), Finland is also implementing its data exchange layer, with both countries agreeing to develop a federated solution. In 2017, this resulted in the formation of a joint organisation, The Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions, which has the mission to develop federated e-governance solutions connecting Estonian X-Road technology with its Finnish counterpart (_Palveluuvyla_). The first pilots based on these federated two-country data exchange layers are live and focus on the exchange of business and population data (see specific use cases: Population Registry and Business registry). In addition, there are also use case of solutions that work only in one city/country, e.g., Smart Meters in Estonia and Environmental Services in Helsinki. If the federation of data exchange layers between two countries (see Figure 4) was fully implemented, this would offer an experimental setting for a joint cross-border e-service between the two capitals (it also applies to all cities in Estonia and Finland).