Define City Service/Data Entity

 

The data entities of a city can be represented in a conceptual entity and characterized by its properties. This activity aims to define the data entities which are provided or consumed by a city service. City services can integrate and use common data entities. For instance, the address of data entities such as hospitals, churches, post-offices, police, schools, etc. can be represented in the same conceptual entity called “address” (characterized by properties like street, address number, zip code and city block) (Consoli et al. 2017).

 

Relationship

 

  • Provides/Consumes (City Service, Data Entity): A city service provides or consumes different data entities of the city.

History

The identification of data entities of the services facilitates the interchange and operation of data, providing the application developers with the opportunity to design smart city services efficiently (Consoli et al. 2017). The authors tackle more the issue of reconciling large number of city data of different nature, e.g. organizations, toponymy, public services, etc., into a uniformed and integrated semantic city model, taking more care about data heterogeneity and semantic interoperability at the concept level, which highly support application developers into the design of their city services and applications.

 

Examples

  • A data model for smart cities is presented by (Consoli et al. 2017) to integrate several data sources, including, geo-referenced data, public transportation, urban fault reporting, road maintenance and municipal waste collection. Conceptual data entities with the same meaning are defined in a common data entity in order to manage large and heterogeneous data sources in smart cities.
  • Data related to city services for the collection of municipal waste and disposal of large-size garbage are provided as a large Microsoft Excel file (Consoli et al. 2017).

References

  • Consoli, S. et al., 2017. Producing Linked Data for Smart Cities: The Case of Catania. Big Data Research, 7, pp.1–15. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bdr.2016.10.001.