Page 58 - Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

• Services and Applications. This layer contains the Smart City applications that are offered to
society or devices and that use the resources of the ICT infrastructure. Located in this layer are
the vertical municipal applications such as transport, mobility, electronic administration, tourism,
waste management, energy, and water. New, advanced applications can be developed in an
agile and efficient way since the architecture provides re-usable common functional blocks and
an accessible global data repository.

In the case of the tourism municipal application, it must bring together a range of digital services
aimed at current public problems and market failures throughout the traveller cycle, on the digital
and physical levels. Moreover, it needs to be capable of a city-scale management with a great
number of SMEs connected and monitored, accelerate the digitalization of key processes, improve
the tourist experience, reduce the carbon footprint, boost business figures and generate prosperity
for residents, contributing to the urban space evolution towards a competitive model based on
data and algorithms.

Existing data space initiatives from international organizations such as IDSA and Gaia-X would also
enrich the IT architecture layer since these organizations provide standards for a data exchange
reference architecture, including a governance model and adoption strategy that ensure vital issues
such as trust, security and sovereignty.

This interoperability mechanism, which allows resource and data sharing, consists of a multilevel
reference architecture that begins at a bottom level, but allows the merger of different data
spaces of the same sector of activity to give place to an industrial data space. From this level,
the generation of improved services that either increase sales or reduce costs is easier through
a collaborative process. This kind of structure allows certain sectors like tourism to make a better
case for implementing such interoperability mechanisms given not only their shared public and
private nature, but also their multisector reach, constituting an improved resource- and data-sharing
method that tackles a great current challenge for digital transformation.

44 Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC | June 2023