Page 12 - U4SSC Data and API requirements for centralized smart city platforms

2 Background

SC has been defined and conceptualized by international standards, under the typical process for
innovation clarification (Anthopoulos, 2017). However, even the international standards differentiate,
and they define the SC as a city model that uses state-of-the art ICT to a) improve living, efficiency
and competitiveness with a respect on future generation (ITU, 2014) or to facilitate the planning,
construction, management and smart services (ISO, 2015); while the “smartness” of a city describes
its ability to bring together all its resources, to effectively and seamlessly achieve the goals and
fulfil the purposes it has set itself (ISO, 2015).

These definitions emphasize the importance of ICT in various dimensions that characterize smart
sustainable cities (SSC), all of which are essential for ensuring a high quality of life for citizens. Key
areas include access to public services, energy efficiency in buildings, urban mobility and waste
management, which are all enhanced through strategic ICT integration. The above definitions
also place some features for the SC: the incorporation of cutting-edge ICT and of ICT innovation;
and the use of this technology for connecting the city resources, for delivering enhanced services
and for meeting specific targets (e.g., city efficiency and effectiveness, livability). Today, cutting-
edge ICT concern different existing or emerging technologies (e.g., cloud, edge computing,
data analytics, Internet-of-Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G connectivity, blockchain,
FinTech services), which are being evolved and enable city’s digital transformation (ITU, 2019).
The combination of these technologies is a complex process that relies on open technologies and
follows a specific architecture (Anthopoulos et al., 2015). Numerous cases around the world are
trying to implement SC strategies, via prioritizing challenges and implementing competitive project
portfolios (Anthopoulos, 2019), which show that cities: define their missions; embed technology
in city operations; collect and analyse data to improve efficiency; deliver various types of smart
services across well-established SC dimensions such as people, mobility, economy, governance,
environment and living. Essential areas like access to public services, energy efficiency in buildings,
urban mobility and waste management are all enhanced through the strategic use of ICT, ensuring
a high quality of life for citizens (Giffinger and Gudrun, 2010); engage their communities around
designing and improving these services; work on attracting visitors, citizens and businesses; design
means with the ICT to deal with recent and future challenges (e.g., climate change, poverty) that
have been labelled by the United Nations (UN) as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United
Nations, 2014).

Existing implementations show that the SC development today is based primarily on the above
achievements, and in terms of technology on: IoT embedded in facilities; networks that collect
data from them; city dashboards (Kitchin, 2014) – also labelled “IoT platforms” or “city platforms”
(Fahmideh and Zowgi, 2020) – that visualize them; and applications that transact with the dashboards,
the IoT and with other systems or users.

These implementations show that “IoT” and “platform” are crucial for SC development and indeed,
their combination returned numerous articles in late January 2020 from scientific resources (Table 1).
Only a few of the results appear to be relative to the context of a software dashboard with city data;

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