Interoperabilidade entre Aplicações de Software para Smart Cities: Em direcção a uma Arquitectura de referência

Abstract

With the growth of population in urban areas there is a constant necessity for development and innovation on technologies that surround its citizens. Intelligent cities or Smart Cities are the answer to that necessity. A city is considered smart when investment is made in social elements, traditional transportation and communication infrastructures as means of maintaining a sustainable economy while increasing the quality of life taking into account a wise management of natural resources through a participative governmental entity. A fundamental part of the development process of a Smart City is the engaged participation of its citizens. This aspect is essential for the production of innovative and quality services useful to them.Taking an important role, with the use of mobile applications, citizens provide fundamental information that is taken into consideration on several moments, namely, in decision making on different contexts during the development of new services and the evolution of Smart Cities. The use of mobile applications, as a participative and involving activity by a city's population, ends up not lasting very long and not being very productive, often caused by the poor quality of existing applications and the lack of means for data aggregation. Such aspects result on the dispersion of data between inconsistent databases without any information standards whatsoever.With this we see a decrease in the amount of data retrieved as well its quality overall and validation possibilities, possibly negating any future usefulness it might have.However, with the specification of an software architecture and its development which leads us to an environment for open data, directed at, but not restricted to, mobile applications. Within, there is the opportunity for Smart Cities to collect data input on mobile data of citizens' engagement occurrences as well and supporting endless setups for either business models or development of support tools for the city's government officials. Such an architecture enables the handling of heterogeneous data specifications while promoting an active participative role in citizens and mobile application developers given that they may later model other applications of top this open data ecosystem.