Page 20 - U4SSC Data and API requirements for centralized smart city platforms

4 The centralized concept of “smart city as a hub”

According to the definitions that were previously discussed, the purpose of the SC is to utilize
cutting-edge information communication technologies (ICT) to deal with significant challenges
like improving the quality of local life and sustainable local growth. SCs are not only based on
ICT; several drivers (e.g., efficient services, appropriate connections between various systems in
the cities, shared city infrastructure, operations’ monitoring) also affect its development (Hollands
(2008), Komninos (2008) and Wenge et al. (2014)). Additionally, Pourzolfaghar and Helfert (2017a)
emphasized integration, information sharing and communication among many systems for making
a city smart. This implies that, contrary to the traditional cities, the SC requires innovation and
infrastructure connection and cross-border transactions with data from different systems and
formats (Bischof et al., Anthopoulos and Fitsilis, 2010).

Therefore, the effective information exchange between different systems and smart services,
together with and the provision of high-quality information are two important issues for a SC.
Cross-border transactions in SC are hard to perform in an efficient and effective way, while smart
services and in general city performance must be measured and monitored with the use of key
performance indicators (KPIs). Many KPIs are not simple, and require data from several sources for
their calculation. Indicatively, ISO (2015) and ITU (ITU, 2017; 2014) defined several KPIs to measure
how smart and sustainable a city is, and recently they concluded a global index titled “United for
Smart Sustainable City Index (SSC-Index)” (ITU, 2019b). The dynamic collection and combination
of data requires the appropriate APIs to connect the corresponding sources.

The existing role of the SC platforms (Figure 1), together with this requirement for KPI measurement,
introduces the idea of the SC as a hub (or SC Hub), which is inspired from the typical network hub:
a typical network/ethernet hub enables the alternative ICT devices to connect and exchange data
according to the IEEE 802.3 standard (IEEE, 2019).

This concept of the SC hubness was approached as the “Digital Hub” or the core of the operating
system of a SCP (U4SSC, 2022): the service delivery platform allows to import and organically manage
static and near-real-time data that comes from existing infrastructure. To do so, the Digital Hub exploits
an interoperability interface that links legacy systems, different IoT sensors and all the sources and
services that can be accessed via standard APIs. By exploiting the single components of the Digital
Hub, it is possible to organically manage, collect and classify all the data using common ontologies
based on international standards while working on improving the quality of the data at the origin and
transforming these data into useful information thus enhancing the value of the public information
assets.

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