In the city of Vienna, WoBahn, an open source application, provides real-time information on all metro lines (U1, U2, U3, U4) to citizens. The app visualises the metro map of Vienna, and follows the progress of the different lines, with customised visuals. Thus, citizens can check in real-time the location of the metros at the line and stations.
With public datasets, metro lines interactive map
The use of public datasets has allowed WoBahn to provide real-time information about metro locations in Vienna. With these datasets, that gave WoBahn access to information on departure countdown of all metro lines for any station, WoBahn can display concrete information about all metro lines and stations in Vienna. The data source is on-time departure information from stations, instead of train locations, as there are no datasets on train locations in Vienna. The application coordinates the information for all the stations and displays the outcome on a real-time map. Thereby, Vienna’s public sector datasets are used to develop an interactive map of Vienna’s metro lines.
With public datasets, public code
Wobahn datasets can be found in the Open Data Austria catalogues (Dat.gv.at). Austria government launched Dat.gv.at in 2012, as the search catalogue to access public data. The catalogue has been updated, and it includes ‘open source’ in a new search filter since December 2024. As of April 2025, it contains 56,958 datasets from 1368 organisations. Users can filter open source and open data applications and access the description and details information: maintainers, publishers, licences, etc. The city of Vienna makes metro lines real-time data available in the Wiener Linien Echtzeitdaten dataset, which has been used in 56 different applications.
In the Digitale Agenda 2030, the City of Vienna sets its commitment to develop and upgrade its digital infrastructure and data ecosystem, and maintain Open Government Data (OGD) as the central catalogue for metadata from decentralised public administration data catalogues in Austria. All data that are not personal or subject to specific protection are made available publicly and free of charge. WoBahn has benefited from the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principle. The WoBahn project is licensed under the GNU General Public License and is available on GitHub.