Page 11 - U4SSC Data and API requirements for centralized smart city platforms

1 Introduction

This document deals with the following problem: the scope of smart city (SC) varies significantly
after more than 20 years of appearance in literature, and after an emerging industrial growth.
However, practice shows that the full scope of SC has a limited adoption, since it is mostly being
capitalized for utility upgrades or for urban renovation, while Internet-of-Things (IoT)-readiness
enables real-time city monitoring and the effective management for all city systems and services.
The overall SC infrastructure plays the role of an “open innovation platform”, where several players
can deploy their facilities and launch their applications and/or develop new products, services and
business models. This SC “open innovation platform” transforms the city into a “connected space”,
where data, information, services, materials, things and people flow, and utilize innovation and
technology to monitor, manage and enhance this flow. The SC in such a situation is analogous to
a “hub”, whereby anyone and anything can connect and gain access to the above flows. Moreover,
numerous SC platforms try to integrate the IoT city ecosystem, taking control from cities to vendors’
clouds and obliging their technical specifications to third-party developers, regardless of the
corresponding standardization efforts. In this sense, this document attempts to answer the following
questions:

1) How is the SC open innovation platform being transformed into a hub (SCHub)?

2) How can this SCHub become an “umbrella data-centric platform”, which is able to integrate
(interoperate and interwork) with all SC platforms and give control and governance back to
cities?
3) What are the requirements and architecture considerations of the SCHub?

It is important to answer all these questions because it must first be confirmed that the SC is being
transformed to a “hub” (RQ1), while this SC Hub’s standardization and interoperability must be
performed (RQ2) and its architecture must be determined (RQ3). These efforts will help all the cities
and communities to host “an umbrella for data flows integration and services interoperability (the
SCHub)”, which will be scalable, open and cross-SC-platform-enabled. Additionally, when this hub is
clarified in technological terms, it can show how it can be “calibrated” to serve any type of city, and
the standardization of its flows can be enabled. As such, the contribution of this study is twofold:
it determines that the SC conceptualization is accomplished – several city management platforms
integrate numerous smart services and transform cities to ICT hubs; and with the architecture it
provides this SC Hub approach.

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