Citizen-Centric Data Services for Smarter Cities

Abstract

Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic “smart city in a box” solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens’ active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city’s data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities’ data ecosystem.