Page 16 - Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

2.4 Data-enabled cities and communities

Not only is it important for the local administration to become more effective users of data, it is
just as vital for the city as a whole – for all its businesses, organizations and residents. A smart city
or community is one in which increasing amounts of useful data within the city are collected and
used wherever they can help the city work better.

Given the exponentially increasing amount of data being generated in cities and communities by
many different agencies, and the fact that many of these data could be of value to other agencies,
increasing numbers of cities and communities are setting up their smart city platforms to support
a local data marketplace or ecosystem. The aim is to make it easy for organizations to offer up their
data and easy for potential users of these data to find and access the data.

A whole range of processes are needed:

– To ensure that the data are in a format that can be used easily, and can be accessed easily by
standardized APIs.
– To make it easy for any agency or individual to find out who has data that are useful to them.

– To set up a simple process to exchange these data and, specifically, to ensure that appropriate
rights and obligations as to how these data should be used are complied with.
– To ensure that data protection regulations can be complied with, even if the data being “bought”
are mashed up with other data.

To enable the city and its inhabitants to benefit fully from the enormous amount of useful data
that is already being generated, or could potentially be generated, within the city, the smart city
platform needs to be set up to allow the management of all of these processes. 10

There may be many software platforms working together to make this possible. Different software
platforms might be needed to manage the exchange of open data, the sharing of sensitive data
with authorized agencies under carefully managed conditions, and the buying and selling of data,
where this is appropriate.

However, all these software platforms could feed into a smart city platform providing a data
exchange that offers a single gateway to city data. The more data that can be accessed from that
gateway, the more it will be used by organizations and businesses within the city agencies to
provide access to data useful to them, thus setting up a virtuous circle.

2.5 Data lakes and data spaces

A city administration that is serious about supporting greater use of data to support its service
provision to its inhabitants will want to make sure that all the data it generates are easy to find and

6 Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms