Page 27 - Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

While these eight recommendations are general in nature, they apply directly to the data platforms
that every local administration has or is in the process of establishing. And these data platforms
st
are the basis for sustainable, digital service delivery in cities and communities in the 21 century.

4 Blueprint: architectures and platforms

What sort of digital capabilities does a city need to put in place to enable it to manage and share
increasing amounts of useful data and use it to support city management and the delivery of city
services?

With reference to this question, the two key issues to address are to identify and build the capabilities
to handle the data effectively, and the need to ensure interoperability.

There are many different requirements that need to be implemented for a city to be confident
that it has a scalable and effective infrastructure to handle the collection, management and use of
data, and these are best dealt with by developing an architectural blueprint for the city that is line
with city reference architectures built on best practices and with a smart city platform at the centre.

4.1 Architectures

For cities and communities to be managed in a synergistic way, it is important for stakeholders to
understand and describe how their city functions now and how it plans to change things to improve
the way it works and to adjust to any changes.

“..an architecture defines a framework within which a system can be accurately specified and built
at a specific time frame. Its functionally defines what the elements of the system do and how the
data and information is exchanged between them. An architecture is functionally oriented and not
technology specific, which allows the architecture to remain effective over time. It defines ‘what’
must be done, not ‘how’ it will be implemented.” (ITU, 2016)
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A good example of a typical smart city architecture can be seen in Figure 2.

Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms 17