Like many mega cities of its size, Jakarta faces challenges in streamlining information among its departments and sharing the information with its citizens. With over 10 million people, the city understandably generates massive amounts of data, and yet, prior to the Smart City Portal project, there was very little public access to such data. In addition, there was a reluctance for different city departments to share data and in some cases, when the data was shared, it was often incompatible among departments.

Launched in 2015, the main objective of the Jakarta Smart City Portal was to create a platform to disseminate data to citizens and to increase government transparency and trust. Moreover, there was an intention to increase citizen participation.

The Jakarta Smart City Portal was implemented to address these challenges through open data, and has done so through some exceedingly innovative approaches. The project was put in place by an IT Development Team which takes charge of design and implementation. Integration of data among departments is a key feature of the project. API service allows various departments to integrate between apps and systems automatically or semi-automatically. Furthermore, in the interest of co-creating solutions, third parties such as companies, startups, and even hobbyists are able to collaborate if they wish. IoT even allows integration on a hardware level. One example of how the Jakarta Smart City Portal integrates several systems is its bus tracking system connection to Google Maps, and two applications, Trafi and Appaia, which provide bus schedule services on their platform.