Page 53 - Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

– They need to provide sufficient Interoperability to allow “good enough” integration of systems,
as well as the development of a viable market – cutting costs, minimising risk and preventing
vendor lock-in.
– They need to be Mechanisms that are clearly enough defined to make it easy to determine if a
product or service is compliant and to make it easy to determine the steps to implement.

– They need to be built on existing standards to provide cities with a clear path forward.

• Where there are existing authoritative standards, the MIMs need to reflect the core
requirements of those standards that a city could put in place as a first step to see immediate
benefits in developing the local data ecosystem.
• Where there are several standards initiatives that cover the same ground, the aim will be to
identify the lowest common denominator (or the Pivotal Point of Interoperability) that will
make it easy to link products and services that comply with those different sets of standards.

8.1 MIM 1: Context information management

8.1.1 Goals

Context information management ensures comprehensive and integrated access, use, sharing, and
management of data across different solutions and purposes. It manages the context information
coming from IoT devices and other public and private data sources providing cross cutting context
data and access through a uniform interface.

8.1.2 Capabilities

Context information contains comprehensive status information about real-world entities defined
in a structured way with formal definitions, and provides functionalities to enable access to different
data sources and analyse the context information, e.g., for detecting events.

The information that cities, regions and communities possess or gather should be available and
easily accessible to applications across different domains. To make the information usable, context
information is key.

This will enable applications to discover the information relevant to them; for example, by specifying
what is needed and retrieving or subscribing to this requested information. To share and re-use this
information, an agreement needs to be in place regarding the definition of the concepts; this can
be provided by data information models. This enables the discovery and querying of information,
current and historical, and the inclusion of geospatial information. Applications can subscribe to
changes of information, so that they are always aware of the current status.

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