Open Data integration in context of Smart-Communities: a company's perspective

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1 Open Data integration in context of Smart-Communities: a company's perspective Roberto Metelli1, Consuelo Marini1, Francesco Pirotti2 1 Linea Com S.r.l. - Linea Group Holding S.p.A Viale Trento e Trieste, 38 - Cremona (CR), Italy 2 Interdepartmental Research Center of Geomatics (CIRGEO), University of Padova, Viale dell Università 16, Legnaro (PD), Italy Abstract Comprehension of what is and how to use Open Data has many levels. In the following article we illustrate a work in progress entry-level situation where a publicly owned company wants to create added value using Open Data in the context of a Smart-Community vision of the areas it is involved in. Keywords Energy efficiency, Multiutilities, Smart City, Smart Community, Open Data 1 Introduction The future in management of public elements is tightly coupled with data acquired from sensors which are becoming more common. This is due to lower costs of the sensors themselves, thanks to advances in technology, and to increased availability of distributed sensors, ranging from smart-phones (crowd-sourcing) to smart lighting, smart grid, sensors for any measurable quantity which is of interest. Together this paradigm is called smart - applied to cities and communities. Its focus is to integrate (link) data as much as is needed and possible, linking sources (sensors) with data bases, grids and structures in general which allow management and analysis of the data, adding value and leveraging better usage. The way that data is managed and integrated with data from other sources introduces the importance of Open Data (OD) in a bigger picture of integration of projects related to smart cities/communities. Linea Com Srl, is a company which is part of the LGH SpA Group which has been operating in the ICT field for more than 15 years. It supports a number of municipalities which are partners of group of five companies which constitute LGH (Cogeme Rovato Astem Lodi Asm Pavia Aem Cremona SCS/SCRP Crema). Together these companies cover a large part of the territory of Regione Lombardia, municipalities which are spatially close and / or connected to the territory. Linea Com's mission is to support public administration (PA) in more than 880 municipalities in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, Mantova e Pavia covering more than 3.5 million residents. Since 2007 a strong 281

2 push has been given to converting to Open Source principles, in particular in the group dealing with spatial data services. It successfully coordinated the acquisition and structuring of the topographic geodatabase for more than 200 municipalities, providing a free webgis service to the public were users can access all layers from the topographic database and other spatial layers, view them and download them fully or partially in the main open (and not so open) formats e.g. Shapefile, DXF, DGN, GeoJSON, GeoUML) as well as access them as OGC WMS services. Internally this has been done also for managing the underground infrastructure (GAS) for more than 50 municipalities. External OD services (AGEA WMS services, Provincia di Brescia WMS, egeos WMS etc ) have been added to leverage information availability, thus providing a central hub for spatial data. The above introduction of Linea Com as part of a larger group closely related to the territory and dealing with multiple aspects of municipalities, it is the ideal promoter of the use of data at its best potential, related also towards "smarter" cities and communities. Some of the latest examples are the following: (i) the past funding for improvement of cartography converting it to INSPIREcompatible formats, the topographic geodatabase now all data are in a Postgis structure and available as WMS service; (ii) the Virgo European Project which wants to create a registry of infrastructures which populate our territory below-on-above the ground; in this case OGC services will be used as well as proprietary software, with integrated solutions; (iii) Attiv@bili is another potential future project (if funded) were OD will be analyzed using BigData analytics; (iv) the webgis service provided by Linea Com has a public open profile providing several tools for visualization but also for free downloading of data in Open formats (GML, GeoJSON see figure 1). Other examples of future data integration which Linea Com wants to achieve is for the service of smarter integration in refuse management, renewable resources, water and sewage planning and management. Coordination and collaboration between stakeholders in the LGH group allows to promote synergies and solutions to improve well-being and societal challenges such as security, services and energy resources. 2 Stakeholders and promoters related to Open Data The innovation towards "smarter" communities must have a solid base, which is made of two pillars: network of infrastructures and sharing data/knowledge via Open Data (Figure 2). Related technologies must reach out spatially as much as possible, to be able to promote a new culture related to sharing data and knowledge. Not only technologies must reach far and deep to households of final users, but another important aspect is that of developing sensibility towards the matter. Education in this sense must be promoted at initial levels of education, as well as towards "elderly" users which need to be updated to new technologies to avoid being isolated in a fast-moving society. To achieve what is presented, a first step is to create a network of sensors to read data, and a second step is to provide intuitive interaction between the data and the users at different levels of capability depending on their final goals. Connectivity with 4G technology coupled with new street-lighting can be a very interesting example. Light-poles in cities can become a hub for monitoring the 282

3 area for security (cameras) and provide "infotainment" basically an interaction with access to digital information, and also provide data to improve mobility thus lowering the carbon footprint. Another fundamental aspect is the spreading of open-source technologies in public administration offices. This has often been seen as an "obvious" and "easy" task, but it is not so straightforward. Changing a work-flow of several offices and numerous users has always been seen as a risk, especially some years ago when open-source software was not so compatible (even now trying to open this odf with Word would not keep the layout). Open-source users usually have a higher level of proficiency with computers, and provide solutions that seem simple to them, but that might sound like jabber jargon to others. This is changing now that many open source projects have become much more user friendly and interoperability solutions are becoming more common. This will surely push for an easier transition from expensive licensed software to open-source software and especially formats, which will be easily shared, and thus following the principle of re-utilization. Figure 1: Example of topographic geodatabase with possibility to download data in different spatially enabled formats. Spatial and non-spatial Open Data is fundamental with what has been said above. Of course some type of data cannot be completely set in the open domain, as privacy and security are important issues, nevertheless there is an enormous amount of data which is underused, like a gold mine which has not been tapped yet. Putting such data in the public domain with Open Data 283

4 licenses would thrust a new era of sharing and collaboration, providing new utilization for the data and improving collaborative networks between users in the same public administration, between public administration, and externally to public administration. Linea Com wants to create value from its data by enhancing its accessibility and thus its fruition. One way is the education towards using and providing Open Data towards all players involved. This can be done in many domains, such as the public bodies themselves, administration, and single citizens which are encouraged to use and be aware of data and appreciate the multiple uses that derive from it. 2.1 Open Data principle in a Smart City context It is often the case that when implementing a project dedicated to integration of elements focused towards a Smart City context, the data which is available is not structured, standardized or either in a digitally usable format. This lower the overall quality and requires a significant amount of processing to modify the data and render it in a more usable format. This effort towards standardization is carried out at many levels and in many cases. Open Data can be a starting point for forcing stakeholders to relate to their data in a way that "cares" also for uses other than theirs. Thinking that "my data will also be used by others, using other software" will, probably, create a positive mechanism where users will try to structure their data and save it in interoperable formats. This will facilitate sharing and usability and thus add value to the data itself Spatial data The Italian Agency for Digital Italy (Agenzia per l Italia Digitale - AGID) has stated that "spatial data constitute a knowledge base for all policies related to land-use management". This might seem obvious for users of spatial data and city planners, but it is often not so for policy makers which do not have a clear idea of the process behind planning phases for transportation, security, risk assessment, environmental hazards etc. It is therefore a "best practice" when planning "smarter" cities to give utmost importance to spatial data. Also in this case, like mentioned in the previous section, Open Data can leverage all kinds of positive mechanisms which allow a private citizen to get information and give information for its peers. This is were Linea Com would like to make a difference: providing services pushing on structuring and opening data, spatial and not. The benefits from this type of effort are more than documented in literature and in best-practice scenarios. It is now the moment to jump from research and development to actual implementation in districts and municipalities, educating ourselves and others to sharing and opening, knowing that "you get what you give" is also true for data. 284

5 Figure 2: Linea Com's concept of integration of Smart Community with the two pillars, Open Data and Infrastructures. References Dati territoriali. (2015). Agenzia per l Italia Digitale. Retrieved February 2, 2015, from 285

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