City Platform as a Service - Integrated and Open

Project Information

CPaaS.io

Grant agreement ID: 723076

DOI

10.3030/723076

Project closed

EC signature date 17 June 2016

Start date 1 July 2016

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 1 786 407,50

EU contribution

€ 1 326 407,50

Coordinated by

BERNER FACHHOCHSCHULE
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CPaaS.io (City Platform as a Service - Integrated and Open)

Reporting period: 2017-07-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

"The CPaaS.io project was a 30-month research project jointly funded under the Horizon 2020 programme by the European Commission and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan and ran from July 2016 to December 2018. The acronym stands for ""City Platform as a Service - Integrated and Open"".
The overall goal of the project was to develop a cloud-based urban data platform for Smart City innovation. The platform combines Internet of Things (IoT) with Open Government Data (OGD) and gives access to the data via open APIs or as Linked Data, so that others can build new services and applications on top of the platform. As such, the platform supports bottom-up and co-creation approaches that are used in many cities, e.g. Amsterdam, Zurich or Tokyo.

The practical relevance of this platform has been evaluated and reviewed in cooperation with several cities that already had previous experience in the Smart City and Open Data domains. In Europe these are Amsterdam, Murcia and Zurich, in Japan these are Sapporo, Tokyo and Yokosuka.

Overall, the project had the following six objectives.
Objective 1: Develop an Open Social City Platform
Objective 2: Deploy the City Platform as a Service Solution
Objective 3: Empower the citizen to her data
Objective 4: Validate the platform with use cases providing public value
Objective 5: Develop blue prints for the adaptation and transfer of solutions to other cities
Objective 6: Create impact in cities

All objectives have been achieved, as is detailed in the Deliverable D8.4 ""Final Report: Summary of Outcomes"", publicly available on the project's web site. The functional architecture of CPaaS.io is generic in the sense that it defines necessary functional components for a Smart City data platform that integrates and makes available IoT data, that can address security and data protection aspects, and that allows a flexible (re-)deployment of analytics functionality from the cloud to the the edges. It also enables integration on the semantic layer, to enable interoperability between different platform instances based on different implementation technologies, as we demonstrated by federation of a FIWARE-based platform instance in Europe with a u2-based instance in Japan.
We are confident the concrete outcomes of the project as described in this report will live on beyond the project. So has the projects work resulted in improved or (with Fogflow) completely new FIWARE components that are available as open source and that we already see being used in other projects and city deployments. Secondly, the work of CPaaS.io on semantics has strongly influenced the new semantic interface for FIWARE, NGSI-LD.
Finally, the uptake in cities in the future is already visible, as our stakeholder cities are expanding their smart city activities, and new cities are adopting the technologies. The project partners of CPaaS.io are continuing to work with these cities, using the tools developed during the project for the benefit of these cities and their citizens.
"

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first year of the project, we defined the overall functional architecture of the platform as well as a mapping towards the two implementation architectures – one based on FIWARE Generic Enablers, one based on the u2 architecture. These implementation architectures have also been instantiated in Europe and Japan, and the agile process has been set up to develop the platform instantiations further in order to reach the full functionality of CPaaS.io. Regarding the use cases, first prototypes in the event management domain (concretely, Color Run and Sapporo Snow Festival) were built and used in the respective events, and the water management use case was set up.

This work was continued and expanded in second period, resulting in the following main outcomes of the project:
1. Functional Architecture (Conceptual Outcome):
2. Platform Federation (Conceptual Outcome):
3. Personal Data Stores (Conceptual Outcome):
4. Data Quality Ontology (Conceptual Outcome):

5. FIWARE Toolbox (Implementation Outcome):
6. u2 Toolbox (Implementation Outcome):
7. Tools supporting City Developers (Implementation Outcome):

8. Concrete Results in Cities:


ADD summary of exploiation / dissemination reports

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Regarding the potential impact of the CPaaS.io project, the project will provide the technical foundation (through the platform) as well as methods for implementing (through the blue prints) for a city data infrastructure. Such an infrastructure provides data, data-related services, data-related guidelines, and model solutions for data reuse as an easily accessible service to all citizens as well as public and private organizations. As such, it allows the efficient sharing of data between providers and consumers, supports new business models, and is thus a key enabler for the digital economy and societal collaboration, fitting well with the European priority of a digital single market , the “Declaration to be the World’s Most Advanced IT Nation” of the Government of Japan, as well as national initiatives to establish national data infrastructures. Efficient and clearly regulated access to and sharing of data helps to further improve industry processes and allows to create new businesses based on newly available data.

On a practical level, the project makes important contributions that can be exploited directly in the product and service offerings of the project participants. The results of CPaaS.io will be directly fed to the respective customer and might lead to larger scale efforts from cities and regions around the world. Also the other project participants in Europe and Japan have already offerings in the market that will directly profit from CPaaS.io
.
On a scientific level, the project contributes to the body of knowledge in the areas edge vs. cloud computing, context-aware adaptive and user-controlled data protection, integration of IoT with Open Government Data, and data quality – areas which are crucial not only when it comes to making the best out of recent technological progress related to big data, but also with regard to addressing present global challenges, as detailed above. And through the involved academic institutions it is ensured that this body of knowledge is also integrated into the teaching curricula.

On the social level the direct involvement of citizens as well their ability to control their data will be verified in different use cases. Feedback from these experiments is especially interesting for the cross-cultural aspect of data governance and privacy. Respective results will be fed to government bodies, to the research community, as well as to industry.

Smart City Innovation Technologies

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