Abstract
Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase specially focused on sustainability and improving citizen’s quality of life. However, such objectives are hard to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not performed following a common approach. Under the paradigm of smart city, different Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been deployed over urban environments to enable such digital transformation. However, actual implementations differ from one city to another, and even between services within the same city. As a consequence, the deployment of urban services is hindered, since they need to be tailored to each city. In addition, the isolation of urban services obstructs its optimization, since it cannot harness contextual information coming from other services. All in all, it is necessary to implement tools and mechanisms that allow us to ensure that city solutions and their vertical services are interoperable. In order to tackle this issue, different initiatives have proposed architectures that homogenize the interaction with smart cities from different angles. However, so far the compliance with such architectures has not been assessed. Having this in mind, in this work we present a validation framework, developed under the umbrella of the SynchroniCity project, which aims to verify that interfaces and data exposed by cities are aligned with the adopted standards and data models. In this regard, the validation framework presented here is the technical enabler for the creation of an interoperability certificate for smart cities. To assess the benefits of the validation framework, we have used it to check the interoperability of 21 smart city deployments worldwide that adhered the SynchroniCity guidelines. Afterwards, during an open call a total number of 37 services have been deployed over such SynchroniCity instances, thus confirming the goodness of uniform and validated smart cities to foster service replicability.
Highlights
The pervasive presence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in all realms of society is allowing the evolution of legacy services and the definition of new ones
Due to the maturity reached by the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and its pervasive presence, its adoption is a fundamental aspect to evolve urban environments
Many solutions and approaches have been postulated in the last years, it is still needed to develop the means to further evolve the IoT based services in urban ecosystems
Summary
The pervasive presence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in all realms of society is allowing the evolution of legacy services and the definition of new ones. In order to answer those needs, the European SynchroniCity project has proposed an architecture that aims to promote the adoption of a common technical foundation for smart cities, which enables service interoperability and replicability. To this end, SynchroniCity took an inclusive approach putting together cities and private stakeholders in the architecture definition. SynchroniCity took an inclusive approach putting together cities and private stakeholders in the architecture definition This way the proposed framework seeks providing a solution (1) easy to adopt by cities, even when they already have existing solutions, and (2) foreseeable in the way urban-data and urban-service providers can interact with it, so that it simplifies interoperability and service replicability.
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