Page 44 - A U4SSC deliverable - Accelerating city transformation using frontier technologies

Tracing the future path of frontier technologies in cities

The technical challenges remain

As demonstrated above, frontier technologies are largely driven by data. Embedding intelligent sensors
into existing infrastructure allows cities to collect data on performance and good data management
can turn this data into actionable insights that enable benefits such as cost saving, improvements in
resource allocation, and the generation of sustainable growth. However, city data are extremely diverse
and vast in volume. The amount of data is expected to grow as IoT and other frontier technologies
continue to expand and generate further data traffic.

Being able to integrate all available data from a wide range of sources, analyse it and extract insights for
actions, is one of the most challenging tasks for smart sustainable cities. In order to extract serviceable
and operable data and develop public policy to address city challenges, the data source has to be
identifiable and data quality has to be warrantied.

As shown in figure 9, city data can be filtered into three categories: total available data; serviceable
available data; and serviceable operable data. Cities need to know the data origin, how they were
collected and when, by what or by whom, for what purpose and with which kind of sensor. It is equally
important to identify and measure the margins of error (total available data). Once the data quality
is warrantied, cities would be able to identify which data are suitable for city applications and apply
them locally (serviceable available data).

Figure 9: Categories of city data

34 Accelerating city transformation using frontier technologies | A U4SSC deliverable