Collaboration-Centred Cities through Urban Apps Based on Open and User-Generated Data

Abstract

This paper describes the IES Cities platform conceived to streamline the development of urban apps that combine heterogeneous datasets provided by diverse entities, namely, government, citizens, sensor infrastructure and other information data sources. This work pursues the challenge of achieving effective citizen collaboration by empowering them to prosume urban data across time. Particularly, this paper focuses on the query mapper; a key component of the IES Cities platform devised to democratize the development of open data-based mobile urban apps. This component allows developers not only to use available data, but also to contribute to existing datasets with the execution of SQL sentences. In addition, the component allows developers to create ad hoc storages for their applications, publishable as new datasets accessible by other consumers. As multiple users could be contributing and using a dataset, our solution also provides a data level permission mechanism to control how the platform manages the access to its datasets. We have evaluated the advantages brought forward by IES Cities from the developers' perspective by describing an exemplary urban app created on top of it. In addition, we include an evaluation of the main functionalities of the query mapper.

Smarter Open Government Data for Society 5.0: Are Your Open Data Smart Enough?

“…As an example, Aguilera et al [ 49 ] stress that the API allowing real-time data contributes to the development of smart cities and urban applications, while, according to [ 44 ], the introduction of the API for Transport of London-related open data even caused a temporary halt, due to high demand by apps using this service. Aguilera et al [ 49 ] stress that API allowing real-time data contributes to the development of smart cities and urban applications. To sum up, it is recognized as one of the best practices for data platforms.…”

“…Although this relates mainly to real-time data, this study will check the availability of API for all types of data since this is in line with Industry 4.0 and the future of open (government) data. Today, API is one of the most crucial factors for turning data into economic value because bringing open data closer to entrepreneurs and citizens influences open (government) data's potential re-use for the creation of new services and products [3,38,44,49,50]. As an example, Aguilera et al [49] stress that the API allowing real-time data contributes to the development of smart cities and urban applications, while, according to [44], the introduction of the API for Transport of London-related open data even caused a temporary halt, due to high demand by apps using this service.…”

Mobile Applications in China's Smart Cities

“…Smart city apps can thus take advantage of the latest technologies and facilities (especially IoT networks and wireless sensors) embedded in the smart city ecosystem. After combining and processing various datasets provided by diverse entities, including government, citizens, IoT sensor infrastructure and other related data sources (Aguilera et al, 2016), smart city apps can offer many innovative functions and real-time services that go beyond the technical limitations of conventional mobile apps, such as providing real-time availability of parking spaces and showing instant bus arrival time, etc Giuffrè et al, 2012). Surprisingly, and despite their unique nature and importance towards realizing the smart vision, there is a significant scarcity of studies focusing on smart city apps.…”

Towards Citizen Co-Created Public Service Apps

“…As the harvesting modules expose a set of interfaces, developers could implement new plugins for harvesting data from other social networks and non-web sources. New datasets and resources are created inside the ODS from metadata gathered from these sources, but the created resources link to the original location of the data.Query Mapper: created as part of the IES Cities European project [8], the Query Mapper allows performing SQL queries over data resources existing in the ODS, returning results on JSON format. For enabling this functionality, the resource has to be mapped through the proper JSON mapping, as can be seen in Figure 3.…”

“…Query Mapper: created as part of the IES Cities European project [ 8 ], the Query Mapper allows performing SQL queries over data resources existing in the ODS, returning results on JSON format. For enabling this functionality, the resource has to be mapped through the proper JSON mapping, as can be seen in Figure 3 .…”