Image JCT 600. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.
Want to know how noisy it is in Helsinki, the air quality in Santander (Spain), or how many people are walking down Portland Street in Manchester?
Perhaps not, unless you live in, or have a particular interest in, one of those cities, but the fact that such data is on offer and readily available shows the power of a multicity initiative to facilitate the sharing of IoT data gathered from smart city applications.
I wrote recently about an ETSI initiative to develop a Next Generation Service Interface linked data (NGSI-LD) API to enable the sharing of data from IoT applications in smart cities.
The SynchroniCity IoT Data Marketplace has already made that data sharing a reality. SynchroniCity is “a global IoT market where cities and businesses develop shared digital services to improve the lives of citizens and grow local economies.”
Marketplace for smart city data
In December 2018 SynchroniCity launched the IoT Data Marketplace, which is where you get can access to the data on noise in Helsinki, and much, much more.
The marketplace was developed in conjunction with Digital Catapult – a UK Government agency set up to drive the early adoption of advanced digital technologies, and on the SynchroniCity website there’s an interview with Alex Gluhak, head of technology at Digital Catapult, where he explains the technology behind the Digital Marketplace.
It has roots in common with the ETSI initiative: the NGSI API from the Fiware Foundation. Gluhak says the SynchroniCity reference architecture is based on the Fiware NGSI API, which will be the baseline for the upcoming ETSI NGSI LD standard.
“We conducted a thorough analysis of the current market and offers already available and decided to base the IoT data marketplace on generic Fiware enablers, which are already supported by TM Forum Open APIs,” he said.
Fiware’s stated mission is “to build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new smart applications in multiple sectors”.
Fiware is described as “a curated framework of open source platform components to accelerate the development of smart solutions”.
TM Forum open APIs were not developed specifically for smart city data sharing. TM Forum says its suite of 50+ REST-based Open APIs were developed to enable service providers to “transform their IT and operational agility and customer centricity, while externally delivering a practical approach to seamless end-to-end management of complex digital services.”
Overcoming the barriers to data sharing
In the interview Gluhak spells out many of the issues that can inhibit smart city data sharing and says the IoT Marketplace has overcome these.
“Data providers can define licenses for the use and data users have the peace of mind of service level agreements that are safely stored on a distributed ledger.”
“There is no need for time-consuming bilateral negotiation of terms for access and business use of data. And most importantly, all data is presented in a harmonised way from various data sources.”
“The IoT Data Marketplace – thanks to the licensing – allows also [cities] to offer private sector data or to monetise data depending on concrete terms defined by the data provider. … The user then agrees and all service level agreements are stored on the blockchain and tracked to settle potential disputes in the future. This environment creates trust among all stakeholders of the marketplace.”
Sounds like an initiative that could provide valuable lessons for other data sharing initiatives, of which there are likely to be many.
