Policy and legislation
Policy objectives
Smart urban technologies can make a significant contribution to the sustainable development of European cities. 75% of the EU population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is growing as the urbanisation trend continues, both in Europe and worldwide.
A smart city is an entity that uses ICT effectively, to integrate the requirements of its urban community, in terms of energy and other utilities (production, distribution and use), environmental protection, mobility and transport, services for citizens (healthcare, education, emergency services etc.) and with proper regard for security, both of individuals and their personal data, and use it as a driver for economic and social improvements. This would also increase the deployment of smart technologies and solutions in rural communities, contributing to the development of businesses and creating conditions for making smart communities attractive to the population.
In standards terms, there are some over-arching requirements, concerning standards for common terminologies, for citizens’ interface with their local authority, etc. But mainly, smart city standards topics relate to the need to ensure commonalities —as far as these are appropriate and cost-effective— between the approaches taken by the different application areas, to enable the city to derive the best horizontal advantage from its overall approach and above all benefit from interoperability. The standards requirements as such for these application areas are specified in the Rolling Plan elsewhere at the appropriate points.
The core components in such a complex system are the frameworks that assist companies, cities and other actors to provide appropriate solutions that prioritise economic, social and environmental outcomes. Solutions should address the whole lifecycle, optimising environmental, social and economic outcomes through the seamless transfer of information.
EC perspective and progress report
The Commission has created the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (SCC EIP) which has established a smart cities stakeholder platform, with ESO participation, and a high-level group advising the Commission. The high-level group released in early 2014 a strategic implementation plan (SIP) setting out a joint vision, a common target and proposals for implementation, which contain standardisation aspects.
Within the EIP SCC action cluster on Integrated Infrastructures and Processes an initiative of 110 cities and 93 industry partners created, among other deliverables, a reference architecture and design principles for an open urban platform, which became a standard of DIN and is moving towards a standard in the international SDOs.
Benefiting from valuable contributions from our stakeholders, the Commission fostered the creation of a common interoperability language called SAREF (Smart Appliances REFerence ontology), which became a standard of ETSI and OneM2M (the Global initiative for Internet of Things standardisation) in 2015. Since then a new version of the SAREF standard has been released that made SAREF modular and extensible via extensions. The initial SAREF became the first extension for Energy together with two more extensions (Buildings and Environment) followed at the beginning of 2019 with standardisation of three more extensions (Smart Cities, AgriFood and Manufacturing) and now four new extensions are in the pipeline and under development (automotive, health, water and wearables) turning SAREF into the IoT smart city ontology.
References
- Strategic Implementation Plan, http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/files/sip_final_en.pdf
- COM(2012) 4701: Smart Cities and Communities — European Innovation Partnership
- COM(2017) 228 final: Mid-Term Review on the implementation of the Digital Single Market Strategy - A Connected Digital Single Market for All
- COM(2016) 176: ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market
- COM(2015) 192: A Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe
- COM(2016) 176 ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market
The "United for smart sustainable cities" (U4SSC) initiative coordinated by ITU, UNECE and UN-Habitat and supported by 13 other UN agencies and programmes to advocate for public policy to emphasize the importance of ICT in enabling the transition to smart sustainable cities (see the ITU section below for more details).
Requested actions
Action 1: Interoperability language with premises. CEN-CENELEC-ETSI smart cities and communities coordination group (SSCC-CG), working on five main objectives:
- promoting an enabling framework for smart cities;
- growing partnerships with key stakeholders;
- developing a reference point for the coordination of consistent smart city standardisation by ESOs;
- communicating and promoting standards on smart cities;
- assessing smart citizen-related standards
The initial phase of the SSCC-CG work had been completed towards end 2016, and an overview white paper from January 2015 is available(1).
SSCC-CG activities are taken over by the CEN-CENELEC-ETSI Sector Forum on Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SF-SSCC). Moreover CLC/TC 205 HBES (Home and Building Electronic Systems) is working on data modelling in the standard series EN60491; in a first step for energy management in home and buildings; in a second step for interaction with the residential and building premises which will benefit to the management of premises within the smart cities architecture.
Action 2: An ETSI technical report is being prepared to clarify whether further standardisation is needed on citizen issues related to smart cities (e.g. on what, where, when etc.), and to take full account of other standards activities under way. The TR would also support the other recommendations at policy level. The EIP SSC recommends to fully respect consumer privacy (EIP SCC operational implementation plan, page 6) in support of the strategic smart city goals. The Commission and SETIS consider it essential for innovation to build trust, especially concerning energy data security and privacy (SET plan, December 2014, page 7.) This work is done in close cooperation with the Citizen Focus Action Cluster of the EIP SCC and the eGov Initiative.
Action 3: Standards for the delivery of parcels and packages. SDOs to investigate on the possible optimisation of available ICT standards regarding the delivery of parcels and packages on the last mile. Due to the dramatically increasing e-commerce European cities are overwhelmed with parcel delivery trucks. The number of packages arriving at peoples’ homes has increased exponentially over the last couple of years.
Action 4: Privacy issues: SDOs to check existing standards for account to the protection of individuals with regard to personal data processing and the free movement of such data. To ensure commitment to the public-interest nature of privacy and data protection, the ESOs should develop specific privacy by design compliant standards and recommend and contribute to cyber security standards.
Action 5: Smart city standardisation initiative (European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) memorandum of understanding (MoU) on urban platforms, EIP demand-side group on urban platforms, Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC)): A concrete proposal is the oneM2M (global partnership project, with the participation of ETSI and other regional SDOs) standardisation process on smart city interoperability. It includes open APIs providing a lightweight means to gather, publish, query and subscribe to reliable real-time urban information, an interoperability framework/platform for the publication, management, discovery and consumption of urban data, and common data models/ontologies. This action will ensure the necessary standards specifications needed for a global market of open urban service platforms and applications, integrating other standards and complementing protocols and communication standards. The work will cooperate with similar initiatives such as the EIP-SCC MoU on urban platforms; it will use the results of the EU funded project Espresso, get high-level requirements from city-led initiatives such as the EIP SCC demand-side group on urban platforms and the global OASC initiative; and it will use these latter two city-led groups as control, advisory, promotion and scale mechanisms. Aligning the work, output and goals of the European and international standards developing organisations and the other initiatives listed above is crucial. Substantial progress on this action has been made and some commendable work on this action has already been done in the ETSI ISG CIM most notably the standardisation of NGSI-LD APIs for context information management. Further steps for this action point include:
- Catalogue of the best practise and lessons learned of Smart Cities in using standards
- Guidelines or specifications for federating Smart City databases (selective access) and for data marketplaces
- Referencing of ITU-T FG DPM work in ETSI work, to reduce “parallel evolution” between the ESOs and ITU
- Interworking of NGSI-LD on top of the oneM2M platform
- Further recommendations of SAREF for ontologies to cover real applications in each (urban) vertical
- Guidelines or specifications how to use NGSI-LD to directly reference the SAREF ontologies
- Guidelines or specifications for NGSI-LD, how to add the provenance of information to each dataset, so that licensing, privacy, accuracy and freshness of data can be made explicit and GDPR requirements facilitated, and so that "Digital Twins" can accurately represent real things, with appropriate security features including identification, authorisation, access control, data integrity and confidentiality.
Action 6: Define a set of standards and related criteria for the deployment of smart city platforms under the Digital Europe Programme. The set will be based on the EIP SCC Reference architecture and design principles for urban platform, the OASC Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms, NGSI-LD and SAREF and will further specify the minimum standardisation requirements to be met to achieve the goal of Interoperable European ecosystem of platforms and applications.
Activities and additional information
Related standardisation activities
CEN
CEN/TC 465 ‘Sustainable and Smart Cities and Communities’ has been created by CEN in October 2019. The TC is intended to address specific European needs through a consistent approach with the activities of ISO/TC 268 ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’.
CEN, CENELEC, ETSI
The Coordination Group on Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities has published a report at http://www.cencenelec.eu/standards/Sectors/SmartLiving/smartcities/Pages/SSCC-CG.aspx and is now following up the recommendations, through a series of five specific activities. It proposes to lead in relation to the EIP action cluster on standards. It was proposed that the SSCC-CG activities will be taken over by the new CEN-CENELEC-ETSI Sector Forum on Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SF-SSCC).
The SF-SSCC, created in January 2017, is a long-term joint group of the ESOs that acts as an advisory and coordinating body for the European standardisation activities related to Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities.
Coordination efforts by the SDOs, shown at the World Smart City Forum (July 2016 Singapore), further developed in 2017.
The CEN-CLC-ETSI Sector Forum on Smart Cities and Communities created a mapping, which aims at listing relevant standardisation activities and published standards, relevant for the development of Smart Cities. It lists also the different policy and research initiatives in this context. This mapping is designed as a living document, to which any interested stakeholder can contribute ftp://ftp.cencenelec.eu/EN/EuropeanStandardisation/Fields/SmartLiving/City/SF-SSCC_Overview_of_Standards_for_SmartCities.pdf
ETSI
ETSI is providing specifications relevant to city needs and service scenarios for their citizens and infrastructure, including concrete examples that reflect the importance of environmental factors and sustainability objectives.
ETSI’s Human Factors committee (TC HF) is developing a technical report (TR 103 455) to assess the needs of consumers and citizens that must be addressed by smart city standardisation, including accessibility, usability, personalization, interoperability and personal data protection.
ETSI’s Access, Terminals, Transmission and Multiplexing committee (TC ATTM) is developing standards for sustainable digital multi-service cities to support the deployment and roll-out of smart city infrastructures. This work includes a TS detailing measures to ease the deployment of smart new services and their multiservice street furniture within the IP network of a single city or cluster of cities.
From digitizing industrial processes to creating smart services for citizens, it is essential to accurately record data together with its context information, the so-called metadata, and to transfer these without misinterpretation to other systems. Single-purpose solutions work well within a known context but are not suitable for multi-system interoperability.
ETSI’s ISG on cross-cutting Context Information Management (ISG CIM) has published Group Specifications (GSs) for applications to publish, discover, update and access context information (ETSI ISG CIM GS009 V1.2.), initially for a broad range of smart city applications and later for other areas, facilitated by a high-level information model for capturing the structure of physical environments as a graph which can be efficiently serialized as linked data (ETSI ISG CIM GS 006 V1.1.1).
In 2020, ETSI expects to complete a number of specifications on security and privacy issues, and on interworking with important IoT frameworks such as oneM2M.
ETSI published an extension to the SAREF ontology for Smart Cities in July 2019.
ETSI’s ISG on Operational energy Efficiency for Users (ISG OEU) has published a specification which defines global KPI modelling for green smart cities.
ETSI SC USER has worked, within the project “User-Centric approach in digital ecosystem”, on use cases for Smart cities.
ISO, IEC
ISO TC 268 “Sustainable development in communities” is directly working on smart city-relevant issues, including terminology, management systems and indicators https://www.iso.org/committee/656906.html
- ISO/DIS 37122 Sustainable cities and communities - Indicators for smart cities (under development)
- ISO/FDIS 37104 Sustainable cities and communities -Guidance for practical implementation in cities (under development)
- ISO/DIS 37105 Sustainable cities and communities - Descriptive framework for cities and communities (under development)
ISO-IEC/JTC 1 WG11 “Smart cities”
JTC1 has established a Working Group on Smart Cities which serves as the focus of and proponent for JTC 1's Smart Cities standardisation program, focusing in particular on standardisation around the strategic topics on Semantic Interoperability of City Data, Software Platform for Open City Data, Urban Operation System and City planning and smart modelling and simulation.
Current projects:
ISO/IEC WD 30145-1 Smart City ICT Reference Framework- Part 1: Smart City Business Process Framework （under development）
ISO/IEC CD 30145-2 Smart City ICT Reference Framework- Part 2:Smart City Knowledge Management Framework（under development）
ISO/IEC DIS 30145-3 Smart City ICT Reference Framework- Part 3: Smart City Engineering Framework（under development）
ISO/IEC FDIS 30146 Smart City ICT Indicators（under development）
ISO/IEC DIS 21972 Information technology - An upper level ontology for smart city indicators（under development）
ISO/IEC NP 24039 Information Technology – Smart City Digital Platform（under development).
IEEE
There are a number of available standards and active standards projects related to Smart Cities through its Smart Grids, IoT, eHealth, and other related topics. These standards and projects cover a broad spectrum of fields, including but not limited to autonomous and intelligent systems, big data, sensors, healthcare, IoT, transportation, energy, networking and connectivity technologies, including technology and process framework for planning a Smart City, which are critical components to the development and implementation of Smart Cities. IEEE also has key activities in the non-functional core areas of developing standards to address security and privacy of data, which is core in the context of Smart Cities.
https://ieeesa.io/rp-smartcities
ITU-T
ITU-T SG20 “IoT and smart cities and communities” is developing a series of standards that coordinate the development of IoT technologies in cities, including machine-to-machine communications and ubiquitous sensor networks. Some of these standards include sensor control networks in NGN environment (ITU-T Y.4250), platform interoperability for smart cities (ITU-T Y.4200) reference model of IoT-related crowdsourced systems (ITU-T Y.4205), Requirements and capability framework of smart environmental monitoring (ITU-T Y.4207), self-organization network in IoT environments (ITU-T Y.4417).
https://www.itu.int/ITU-T/recommendations/index_sg.aspx?sg=20
ITU-T SG20 “IoT and smart cities and communities” is working on a draft Recommendation on Framework of smart greenhouse service (Y.ISG-fr). Smart greenhouse is an IoT-based approach toward food production. The goal of smart greenhouse is to provide and maintain optimal conditions for growing crops in greenhouse environment; the optimal growth conditions can be automatically adjusted with help of a number of sensors and actuators. Most popular controllable variables for optimal growth conditions are temperature (air, nutrient solution, root-zone), humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2), light (intensity, spectrum, interval), nutrient concentration (PPM, EC) and nutrient pH (acidity).
More info: https://itu.int/go/tsg20
ITU-T SG20 has also approved four international standards pertaining to key performance indicators (KPIs) in smart sustainable cities (ITU-T Y.4900, ITU-T Y.4901, ITU-T Y.4902, ITU-T Y.4903/L.1603. These Recommendations have become the foundation of the United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiative’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Smart Sustainable Cities project. Over 100 cities worldwide have already partnered with the U4SSC to pilot these indicators. Three case studies related to the implementation of the KPIs for SSC have been published.
Dubai: https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2016-DubaiCase/files/downloads/Dubai Case Study-410059-FINAL.pdf
Singapore: https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2017-Implementing-ITU-T-International-Standards-to-Shape-Smart-Sustainable-Cities-The-Case-of-Singapore/files/downloads/418504- ITU_Case-Study-Singapore-E.pdf
Moscow: https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2018-U4SSC-Case-of-Moscow/files/downloads/The-Case-of-Moscow-E_18-00503.pdf
The U4SSC KPIs are contained in the "Collection Methodology for Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities":
https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2017-U4SSC-Collection-Methodology/index.html
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ssc/united/Documents/KPIs-for-SSC-concept-note-July2019/KPIs-for-SSC-concept-note-General-revJuly2019.pdf
U4SSC is a United Nations initiative coordinated by ITU, UNECE and UN-Habitat and supported by 13 other UN agencies and programmes, to help cities and communities become smarter and more sustainable. In addition to the KPIs for SSC project, the U4SSC has published a series of outputs that support the transition to smart sustainable cities in view of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
More info on outputs: https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2017-U4SSC-Deliverable-Connecting-Cities/files/downloads/Deliverable-Connecting-Cities-and-Communities-422022.pdf
https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2017-U4SSC-Enhancing-innovation/files/downloads/Brochure_U4SSC Enhancing innovation and participation_422166.pdf
https://www.itu.int/en/publications/Documents/tsb/2017-U4SSC-Implementing-sustainable-devt/files/downloads/Brochure_U4SSC Implementing sustainable development goal 11_422012.pdf
U4SSC is currently working on deliverables on tools and mechanisms to finance SSC projects, strategies for circular cities, city science application framework, artificial intelligence in cities, blockchain 4 cities, impact of frontier technologies in cities, sharing economy in cities, measuring SSC and communities, monitoring SSC and communities.
For more details on each deliverable, see: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ssc/united/Pages/default.aspx
The U4SSC Implementation Programme (U4SSC-IP) has also been recently created to support the implementation of the U4SSC KPIs for SSC project. The U4SSC-IP is expected to produce deliverables on data for cities, city KPI dashboard, global city simulation tool, city SDG intelligence tool, twin city program, e-mobility energy calculator (etc,.) between 2020 to 2025:
For more information on the U4SSC-IP, see: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ssc/united/Pages/U4SSC-IP.aspx
ITU-T SG5 “Environment, Climate Change and Circular Economy” is the lead Study Group on ICTs related to the environment, climate change, energy efficiency and clean energy and circular economy, including e-waste.)
https://itu.int/go/sg5
IETF
The Energy Management (EMAN) WG has produced several specifications for an energy management framework, for power/energy monitoring and configuration. See http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/eman/documents/ for the details. The framework focuses on energy management for IP-based network equipment (routers, switches, PCs, IP cameras, phones and the like).
A recently published standards track specification (RFC7603) presents the applicability of the EMAN information model in a variety of scenarios with cases and target devices. These use cases are useful for identifying requirements for the framework and MIBs. Further, it describes the relationship of the EMAN framework to other relevant energy monitoring standards and architectures.
Many of the IETF Working Groups listed under section 3.1.4 Internet of Things above are developing standards for embedded devices that may also be applicable to this section. https://trac.ietf.org/trac/iab/wiki/Multi-Stake-Holder-Platform#SmartEnergy
OASIS
Transformational Government Framework (TGF) Description: Models and practices for using IT to improve delivery of public services. https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tgf, https://www.oasis-open.org/news/pr/new-british-smart-cities-specification-uses-oasis-transformational-government-framework
AENOR
Over 20 Spanish standards at AENOR’s CTN 178 on e.g. platforms interoperability, open data in smart cities, smart ports, rural communities and smart tourist destinations, basis for ITU-T SG20 recommendations on these topics http://www.aenor.es/descargasweb/normas/aenor-Spanish-standardisation-on-Smart-Cities-CTN-178.pdf
BSI
BSI's PAS 181:2014 Description: British Smart City Framework. A good practices framework for city leaders to develop, agree and deliver smart city strategies. Uses OASIS TGF (below).
BSI has adopted and published the deliverables of the Demand-side group on Urban Platforms initiative of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities:
- Leadership Guide: a ‘train read’ document for city leaders (this now published under BSI logo)
- Management Framework: helping integrate across the functional silos (published under BSI logo)
BSI, Future Cities
Cities Standards Institute (CSI) is a joint activity to develop a strong network of cities, companies and SMEs to develop the next stage of the BSI's Smart City Catapult Framework.
DIN/DKE/VDE
The German Standardisation Roadmap Smart City
The DIN PAS Reference Architecture adopted from the Reference Architecture deliverable of the Urban platform initiative of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities and the ESPRESSO project is anticipated to be complete in summer 2017.
Other activities related to standardisation
SEMANCO
For the first time developing a semantic energy information framework (SEIF) to model the energy-related knowledge planners and decision makers need
eeSemantics
Stakeholder group on energy efficient buildings data models. Building on the standards promoted by building smart alliance.
Adapt4EE/Ready4SmartCities
Activity related to eeSemantics: group was running a series of vocabulary camps addressing specific sub-areas.
Horizon 2020 call SCC-03-2015 Espresso
Development of system standards for smart cities and communities solutions.
The process for developing, maintaining and promoting smart cities and communities standards to ensure the interoperability of solutions, i.e. the adaptability of solutions to new user requirements and technological change and the avoidance of entry barriers or vendor lock-in through promoting common metadata structures and interoperability using /open standards as opposed to proprietary ones, together with open and consistent data. It should make relevant data and information as widely available as possible —including to third parties for the purpose of applications development— while using common, transparent measurement and data collection standards to ensure meaningfulness and comparability of performance/outcome measurements. The project together with the EIP SCC urban platform initiative is promoting the use of DIN SPEC 91357, freely available for the DIN website, by bringing it to the attention of European cities as well as promoting it worldwide. It is helping to bring DIN SPEC 91357 to CEN/CELELEC and ISO for international consideration. It also contributed to other standards such as the DIN smart "humble" lamppost standard.
Industry Memorandum of Understanding on Urban Platforms
93 organisations from industry and research have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on interoperable urban platforms. The group is led by SAP and developed a set of principles and a joint reference architecture framework to enable interoperability, scalability and open interfaces to integrate different solutions and to develop a joint data and service ontology to be used by individual Smart cities. In addition, they are working to accelerate the adoption of the developed framework by standardisation bodies and other stakeholders. The deliverables of the group (and most notably the reference architecture) have been standardised by DIN in DIN91357. The group is promoting the use of DIN SPEC 91357, freely available for the DIN website, by bringing it to the attention of European cities as well as promoting it worldwide. It is helping to bring DIN SPEC 91357 to CEN/CELELEC and ISO for international consideration.
Demand-side group (city-led) on Urban Platforms (within the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities)
A total of 110 cities — individual cities and two city networks — have already agreed to cooperate more strongly in the area of urban platform by signing a Letter of Intent. The group is working within the urban platforms cluster of the EIP on SCC. This group is led by London and has already produced a requirements document for smart city interoperability (urban platform), which is currently being tested. The requirements document is being used by the industry group of the MoU on urban platforms with EIP SCC to create a reference architecture framework and standards landscape. The members of the group are committed to implement commonly agreed open standard urban platforms and foster the deployment of smart city solutions. Two other deliverables of the demand-side group are:
- Leadership Guide: a ‘train read’ document for city leaders
- Management Framework: helping integrate across the functional silos
BSI has adopted and published the latter two deliverables under the BSI logo.
https://eu-smartcities.eu/content/urban-platforms
Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC)
City-led initiative to create a smart city market which addresses the complex needs of cities in the digital transition, especially interoperability, replaceability and comparability, in order to avoid vendor lock-in and to support local digital entrepreneurship. OASC maintains a set of technical Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) which are open and free. Launched in March 2015, a current total of 117 cities in 24 countries, mainly in Europe, have already committed to adopting the OASC principles. OASC promotes standards-based innovation and procurement across application domains, and the MIMs are directly linked to the existing standardisation processes on national, European and international level, including the SF-SSCC and ITU-T.
SynchroniCity
European IoT Large-Scale Pilot on Smart Cities (part of the 104m€ H2020 IoT-LSP Programme) with 8 core European cities (some are also EIP-SCC-01 Lighthouse Cities), 38 partners in total, a budget of 20m€ (15m€ EC contribution) and a running period of 36 months (2017-19). SynchroniCity aims to establish an open market for IoT-enabled urban services based on the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs). The project validates the MIMs as well as other existing and emerging standards through around 20 pilots involving at least two cities, including an open call for new cities and companies to join. SynchroniCity actively builds upon and contributes to initiatives such as EIP-SCC, FIWARE and oneM2M, and both the validation results and new specifications are contributed to the relevant European and global SDOs, such as ETSI and ITU-T. Specifically, SynchroniCity partners are leading and contributing to the ETSI ISG CIM and to the ITU-T SG20 Open API work item and FG-DPM-IOTSCC.
Future Internet Public Private Partnership
Specifications and technologies developed under the Future Internet Public Private Partnership programme (FP7) that can be used within the context of smart cities:
FIWARE has developed an open source implementation of the ETSI ISG CIM GS 009 V.1.2.1 NGSI-LD API that provides a lightweight and simple means to gather, publish, query and subscribe to context information. This is an API for context information management. Such information can be indeed open data and/or linked data and consumed through the query and subscription API. It is possible to publish real-time or dynamic data and offer it as open data for the reuse by applications.
FIWARE CKAN: Open data publication generic enabler. FIWARE CKAN is an open source solution for the publication, management and consumption of open data, usually, but not only, through static datasets. FIWARE CKAN allows to catalogue, upload and manage open datasets and data sources, while supports searching, browsing, visualising or accessing open data. FIWARE CKAN is an Open Data publication platform that is used by many cities, public authorities and organisations.
EUROCITIES and GREEN DIGITAL CHARTER (GDC)
A strategic, city-led initiative aiming to improve cities and citizens’ quality of life through the use of open and inclusive digital solutions. GDC is a EUROCITIES initiative launched in 2009 and currently signed by 52 major European cities. It works at the highest level with CEN/CENELEC SF-SSCC, ETSI SDMC, the MoU on urban platforms and OASC.
Apart from GDC, EUROCITIES works with its member-cities for “Data” and “Standards & Interoperability” through the two respective working groups of its Knowledge Society Forum, a networking and collaboration mechanism for more than 70 European cities. http://www.greendigitalcharter.eu
H2020 CITYkeys
Following the SCC-02-2014 call of H2020, nine partners, among which five cities, developed the first public European framework for the performance measurement of smart cities and smart city projects. A set of around 100 key performance indicators (KPIs) and a framework of open-architecture, interfaces and standards help cities design, select, monitor, evaluate and promote smart city solutions. The smart city KPIs of CITYkeys were used by ETSI SDMC for the creation of TS 103 463, “Key Performance Indicators for Sustainable Digital Multiservice Cities”. http://www.citykeys-project.eu/
H2020 Smart Cities Lighthouse projects
Following the decisions in the Strategic Implementation plan of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities, a yearly Horizon2020 Smart Cities call for lighthouse innovation projects has been in place since 2014. The yearly budget is fluctuating, but it is in the ballpark figure of 100 M€/year and the funding of the individual calls is around 25 million per project. There are 12 lighthouse projects at the moment. Within each project there are three leading cities implementing smart city solutions in the areas of energy and transport with the help of ICT and a number of follower and observer cities that replicate the solutions developed for the leading cities. The projects are implementing among other things ICT urban platforms and are working together with their sister project ESPRESSO and the urban platform group within the EIP SCC to implement open-standards based interoperable platforms.
Fed4IoT
The Fed4IoT project faces the interoperability issue, focusing on large-scale environments and addressing the problem at different and synergic levels: device, platform and information. The goal of the project is to federate IoT and Cloud infrastructures to provide scalable and interoperable Smart Cities Applications by introducing novel IoT virtualization technologies. https://fed4iot.org/
Additional information
There are already many activities going on around smart cities in various standards development organisations around the globe. Industry, therefore, welcomes that the Commission does not see a need to trigger further standards development at this point in time but relies on the industry initiatives which have started in organisations around the globe.
Broad coordination, including stakeholders, Member States, and the Commission, is important for making consistent progress in this area which covers a large field of sub-domains. The Commission supports and encourages the efforts of the International and European SDOs to move towards common standards in the area of Smart Cities within as short timeframes as producing viable results allows.
The Spanish Secretary of State has identified the need to establish certain requirements for city platforms to allow interoperability. This is an opportunity for specific European standardisation work which could be developed by CEN-CENELEC and ETSI.
Spanish national plan on smart cities, with a governance model including an innovative advisory board on smart cities http://www.agendadigital.gob.es/planes-actuaciones/Paginas/plan-nacional-ciudades-inteligentes.aspx
ITU and UNECE "United for smart sustainable cities" (U4SSC) initiative to advocate for public policy to emphasize the importance of ICT in enabling the transition to smart sustainable cities.