Skynjar

Skynjar is an open-source software framework designed for real-time, privacy-preserving analysis of streaming sensor data. It targets edge and fog computing environments, enabling low-latency insights without transmitting raw data to centralized servers.

The project emerged from collaboration among academic and nonprofit groups in Europe and North America, with an initial release in 2022 and ongoing development through a community-driven governance model. The etymology of the name Skynjar has not been officially published.

Skynjar's architecture is modular, comprising an ingestion layer that supports MQTT and Kafka, a streaming processing engine, and a privacy layer that implements selective data minimization, differential privacy, and on-device inference. It provides language bindings for Python, Rust, and JavaScript, and emphasizes interoperability with common standards such as OpenTelemetry.

Common use cases include environmental monitoring, smart-city infrastructure, and industrial IoT applications such as anomaly detection and energy management. The framework is designed to operate in environments with limited bandwidth and intermittent connectivity, though performance depends on hardware capabilities and deployed privacy settings.

Skynjar is maintained by a community foundation and licensed under an OSI-approved open-source license. A growing ecosystem of plug-ins and documentation accompanies the core project, with active discussion in community forums and quarterly releases.