Hardly any housing platform shows how its ratings are made. This page lays out the whole machine: which open data flows in, what the AI is allowed to do — and what it is not.
VLM is built in three layers. Up front, what you use: a search, a map, the compare view. Behind them the engines — score, atmosphere fingerprint, light, story. And beneath, the foundation: data factories, cron jobs and checks that feed everything. Every block has an honest fallback — if something fails, the app keeps working.
Gemini turns “quiet, green, with a dog” into weights and facts into language. It never ranks and never invents a score — the numbers stay the truth.
Six dimensions, six perspectives, the same formula for address, Grätzl and district. Same input, same result — frozen by golden tests.
Missing knowledge is a data gap, not a prompt problem. Heurigen, trees, markets, zoning classes: curated open data instead of guesses.
Everything finite is precomputed at build time and shipped as static files — fast, consistent, identical in app, PDF and compare.
Favourites, diary and history stay on your device. No cookie banner because there is nothing to banner; statistics are anonymous and k-anonymised.
AI down → deterministic text. Photo missing → colour composition. A data sense missing → named, never faked.
City of Vienna Open Government Data, OpenStreetMap, GeoSphere Austria, Statistics Austria and Wiener Linien — together 42,546 data points for 23 districts and 99 Grätzl, refreshed by cron. Every source is named in the methodology; nothing is scraped.
How is the Living Score calculated?
From six dimensions (green, transit, safety, quiet, value, urbanity), weighted by the chosen perspective. The formula is deterministic and the same for address, Grätzl and district — no AI involved.
Does the AI invent ratings or places?
No. The AI only translates: wishes into weights, numbers into language. It invents no scores, no places, no distances — and where data ends, VLM says so.
What data is inside VLM?
Open data from the City of Vienna, OpenStreetMap, GeoSphere Austria, Statistics Austria and Wiener Linien — 42,546 data points, refreshed by build scripts and cron jobs. No listings, no scraping.
Why is there no cookie banner?
Because VLM works without cookies, accounts or tracking. Favourites and history stay in your browser; the public statistics are anonymous and only show patterns from five people up.
What happens when data is missing?
Every block has an honest fallback: if the AI is unreachable, the deterministic text appears. If a photo is missing, VLM shows a colour composition from the fingerprint. If a data sense is missing, it is named — never replaced by an invented number.
Is Vienna Living Map free?
Yes — free, ad-free and without sign-up, in German and English.