Page 697 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

Anonymization infrastructure and open data in smart sustainable cities
Overview

ITU‐T Study Group 5 has established a new Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities (FG‐SSC) to
assess the standardization requirements of cities aiming to boost their social, economic and
environmental sustainability through the integration of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) in their infrastructures and operations.
This Technical Report focus on anonymization infrastructure and open data in smart sustainable
cities (SSC), including the demand of open data in SSC, the framework of open data, the handling of
open data in SSC, the technology of open data in SSC and the management of open data in SSC.
Nevertheless, fruitful application examples are provided as use cases and expected (anonymous)
applications of open data in SSC as well as anonymous application for disaster recovery.

Executive summary

Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities (FG‐SSC) has embarked on a journey for integration of open
data and adoption of anonymization techniques for future smart sustainable cities.
This Technical Report has been specifically written for city officials, town planners, enterprise
managers, developers, infrastructure providers, service providers, network operators, and citizens
with the ultimate aim of ensuring data protection and improving data availability within their city of
interest.
Open data is a current movement which requires machine‐readable data to be freely available to
everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions of copyright, patents or other
mechanisms of control. Currently, the open data system is utilized and is in high demand for creating
new services from the level of local community to government. However, in order to beneficially
utilize the open data, excessive exposure of private information which maybe included in the open
data should be mitigated. Despite this need for protection of certain types of data, there are only
few studies on open data utilization for smart sustainable cities (SSC), thereby making it difficult to
get a comprehensive understanding of how these types of data can be both utilized and as well as
protected.

To remedy the lack of credible research on this topic, this document provides a comprehensive study
on open data in smart sustainable cities based on six aspects: (i) the demand of open data, (ii) the
framework of open data, (iii) open data handling, (iv) the technology of open data, (v) the
management of open data and (vi) application examples.

In addition, (a) practical methods of open data anonymization, (b) related information for the
readers’ understanding that highlight the relationship between open data, anonymization, and (iv)
methods of how to utilize the information practically are also provided.

The Technical Report further examines the following; (1) definition of the open data and its
characteristic features and objectives to understand what types of dangers are predicted, (2) open
data framework that provides a general structure to produce and apply open data, (3) related
technologies of open data for maintenance and application, (4) management methods of the open
data from the aspects of usage, quality, secturity, and operation, (5) use cases of open data driven
by governments for smart forecast, city management, metering many types of data with an
anonymization technique using information comunication technologies (ICT) infrastructure.

Further work will aim to analyse the impacts of open data anonymization and its effectiveness.

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 687