New approach to standards and data use for smarter cities
To make a city smart, users and data need to be connected across sectors and the full range of relevant domains and applications to enhance information sharing. However, gaps as well as overlaps in the standards provided by the various standardisation organisations impede or may even thwart a city’s efforts to realise this goal. The EU-funded project ESPRESSO (systEmic Standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities) was launched as a Coordination and Support Action to provide guidelines on how to effectively solve such issues. Specifically, project coordinator Mr Bart De Lathouwer notes: “The core goal was to help (smart) cities in their understanding of the urban platform, the use of standards to achieve interoperability and to decrease the data silos.” ESPRESSO has achieved this through the development of a (German Institute for Standardization (DIN)) standard and reference architecture enabling a smart city urban platform, supporting the vision of the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC). As such, its deliverables “include guidance for cities to help define their needs and understand the available standards (and standards processes), elements and architectures of the urban platform, market actions, and social and economic impacts.” Project work placed the needs of the cities at the forefront. Partners gathered pertinent information through a stakeholder network (SmaCStak), the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities, interviews, meetings with cities and relevant events. Minimal mechanisms and pivotal points of interoperability ESPRESSO took the concepts for minimal interoperability mechanisms (MIMs) from Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) and Pivotal Points of Interoperability (PPI) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “Instead of attempting to create comprehensive specifications and architectures that encompass every conceivable aspect of a city, the MIM approach does the opposite: it establishes the minimal set of interoperability mechanisms that gives users just enough to link systems together when they need to,” De Lathouwer explains. On the other hand, having knowledge of so-called PPI simplifies the integration of a new component into an existing deployment. Awareness of common concepts and component standards is important for the ultimate goal of interoperability as a smart city environment will not be obliged to sell end-to-end solutions, but rather piecemeal parts over time. Raising awareness, increasing potential Following initial studies and work on guides, “ESPRESSO developed an easy to understand 3-tier architecture with recommendations for data sharing (conceptual and practical),” De Lathouwer says. This 3-tier architecture has been tested and proven in two pilots in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Tartu (Estonia). Work on the pilots generated two Engineering Reports (ERs) that include technical details that cities can access for free from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) website (pending approval). These ERs describe in all details the elements that were piloted and what worked and did not work. All standards developing organisations (SDOs) that the ESPRESSO project engaged with provided input into the project and then took the output back into the standardisation process. Included in this list of SDOs are the OGC, the DIN, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and Building Smart International. This work resulted in the creation of the Smart City Domain Working Group in the OGC and a (free) DIN standard. Smarter cities on the horizon Beyond the specifics and technicalities, “the project’s most important outcome has been raising the awareness of standards (to achieve interoperability and avoid data silos),” De Lathouwer states. “Cities engage with organisations that provide systems that do allow access to the information or data gathered by the system,” he adds. Semantic technologies have also been identified as a potential to make data more discoverable and accessible. Project work will live on. The city of Rotterdam has commenced a Roadmap Next Economy project based on ESPRESSO’s work and findings. Additionally, the OGC has taken the project’s output into the Smart Cities Interoperability Reference Architecture (SCIRA) project in the United States.
Keywords
ESPRESSO, interoperability, smart cities, standardisation, urban platform, MIM, PPI, data use
