Page 98 - Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

Concerning the ICT architecture, especially for these corporate databases, they must be created with
a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A city must identify those services that must be transversal to
the entire organization, which can provide microservices or services to the rest of the information
systems: these will also be created in an SOA environment of service orchestration.

Cities must face complex challenges that affect many municipal areas, including the socio-economic
environment. Additionally, the actions taken in a specific area of the city can affect the conquest
of these challenges, which is why it is necessary to have a vision of the city as a system of systems
that is also related to other cities whose relationship is also basic.

In this case, two key concepts appear in the management of a city. Firstly, the need for a corporate
information system that encompasses the entire life cycle of the data and is constituted as the city's
data infrastructure: this must provide the holistic vision necessary to face complex challenges. The
second concept is that of interoperability, which must be thought about from the design stage. It
has implications for the systems of a city and its relationship with other internal objects of the city
and external objects.

This infrastructure must contain at least the following elements:

• Ability to ingest data from IoT devices and other information systems.

• Urban data platform with massive data capabilities, data analytics, context manager to relate
different municipal areas in real-time information.
• Dashboards for citizens and for municipal services and politicians – the latter two to be able to
monitor the challenges of the city, as well as facilitate strategic and operational decision-making.

• Open Data Portal, where those data sets of the city's data infrastructure may be useful for citizens
and companies are published.

Interoperability, as we discussed earlier, is a radically important concept in creating robust,
sustainable and scalable ICT architectures that support the new challenges of cities. The first
decision on interoperability is to create or evolve towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The
objective is the development of specific services that offer a concrete solution that any information
system can use in the city, and even one in which different services can be orchestrated to build
new aggregates.

ITU has already defined the concept of interoperability, and concepts such as minimum
interoperability mechanisms (MIMs) also appear. The European Union has developed the European
Framework and the Interoperability Reference Architecture as the main element for cities to
exchange information.

The construction in cities of ICT architectures based on services having interoperability and security
as default elements in the design of the solution is fully compatible with the strategy being followed
in GovStack.

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