Smart City Data Platform

The state-of-play in EU cities platforms indicates that city platforms are affected by the steady increase of data amounts to be integrated and managed. The trend is driven by IoT/sensor/M2M implementations, and social media. There is also an underlying objective to deliver open data and services from public (and private) sources. Although several proprietary solutions are on the market, these usually struggle this necessary evolution as a vendor dependence is established in the majority of cases when a clear open specifications concept is required. In this sense, it is commonly recognized that cities will benefit from adopting more consistent conceptual and logical urban platform architectures, which will lead to more efficient and effective physical operations and greater benefits in terms of exploiting city data.The Smart City Data Platform through its advanced data services, is providing methods to effectively collect, clean, map and store the different types of assets (e.g., core energy and mobility data, city related data, KPI results, etc.) in an organized, secure and fair manner. It allows data owners to perform operations on an easy and seamless manner, to identify the way and frequency to ingest the available data, the means to curate it utilizing available patterns, identify the appropriate data set mapping to a commonly agreed data model and finally proceed with the definition of metadata to be stored, as complementary information, with the actual data. In addition, within the SC Data Platform, a visualization framework is introduced, that providesto its end-users meaningful visual representations (i.e., graphs) of cities’ data that is collected and properly stored in the platform.

The SC Data Platform is a novel platform, equipped with a set of innovative data-driven services, combined to effectively cover all the aspects of the holistic lifecycle of the smart city data. In particular, the SC Data Platform provides mechanisms to efficiently manage both real-time and historical data ingestion and a range of data storage functionalities, to accommodate their particular needs. The SC Data Platform provided the necessary tools for data governance and security with robust and solid protection mechanisms, customized based on the needs of the data owners, ensuring controlled access and usage of their data assets. In addition to this, the SC Data Platform delivers the required data search and data preparation functionalities, to allow the easy identification, manipulation and usage of the necessary data assets. 

Innovations and differentiating points of the SC Data Platform are related to the functionalities offered by the platform, which introduce characteristics such as flexibility, security, efficiency and performance. The main three categories of functionalities, namely the data collection or import, the data search and sharing and finally the data preparation to serve visualization purposes. 

• With regards to the data import, the SC Data Platform provides extensive flexibility to the data owners through various functionalities and a variety of options that can be utilized depending on their needs. 
• Regarding search and sharing operations, the SC Data Platform offers data consumers to browse through available data assets and utilize various methods for data sharing.
• Smart City data classification and manipulation, to serve the needs of calculating the Key Performance Indicators and prepare the data to be visualized via intuitive dashboards, serving as quantitative means to enable monitoring of the city performance and the specific impact of the implemented interventions

The potential end users of the Smart City Data Platform can be classified by the different roles of their organisation in the electricity data value chain. The classification can be performed taking into consideration the ownership and utilisation of data assets of the SC Data Platform:

• Data Owner: The data owner retains the ownership rights and control of the asset. 
• Data Consumer: The data consumer is the end-user that has obtained legitimate access to an asset provided by the data owner.