Recent studies show that data generated in the world doubles every year: most of this information concerns our daily life and should be of interest for the municipality where we live. But municipalities are often small or medium-sized ones and cannot manage to sort and analyze all the information that is being produced or all the citizens’ requests around it.
In order to solve that unevenness between goals and capabilities, it is important to develop a Smart Data plan as a central part of each Smart City strategy: data is the key point to activate Civic Technologies and to make them really effective.
TeamDev, founded in 2008, mixes its software skills with the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) competencies with the aim of creating tools and products that prove able to support vertical markets and to clear up the problems encountered while undertaking daily tasks or dealing with predictive analysis routines.
The Research and Development team is composed by Smart City experts, Full Stack developers, User eXperience experts and Data scientists.
During the recent years, the working team doubled the effort to put these skills in use in two vertical sectors at the same time, creating and adapting the solutions to fit each one of them. For the agricultural field and within the SmartAgri scope, the team developed the Agricolus ecosystem. And, for smart cities, they have deployed the WiseTown project.
Even regarding the evident differences between these two dominium, there is a common denominator: the high impact that the data analysis presents for both of them.
WiseTown stands for ‘Web Information Streams Enhancer for your Town’. The goal of this solution is to collect information from different streams to identify the issues that are affecting the city in several areas: urban renewal, garbage collection, public safety, transportation, social services and environmental problems. In addition, real-time analysis is accessible by creating a “situation room” to manage the singular occurrences.
In action, WiseTown follows three steps: first, it acquires the data from different sources (portals, social networks, mobile apps, IoT sensors and Open Data from other sources); then, organizes the information according to a comprehensive knowledge database that has been made previously available; and last, it uses the data in order to deliver one-to-one feedback, geographic analysis for events and emergencies and other decision support systems.
More than a single web application, WiseTown is a whole ecosystem that offers analytics and management functionalities, that can support future urban planning, ease to handle real-time events and contingencies and that can aid the creation of a participative environment whete citizens and town managers can discuss the city development.
WiseTown is powered by FIWARE. The WISE orchestrator is the module that interacts with the social connectors, the external APIs and the others data sources. It runs the management of the information collection process, enabling the solution to gather data from several sources. In this phase the orchestrator uses FIWARE Orion Context Broker to connect the platform with the open data, hosted in a CKAN based platform. It also uses FIWARE NGSI to connect the IoT sensors feeds and uses Orion notifications to feed the APIs, exposed for the integration with other software.
The engine analyses, ranks and aggregate the data, assigning the ownership of the information to the right office. Then, it starts its core work: the management and analysis of the reports. Wise Engine is still responsible for the workflow of the reports while Orion Context Broker dispatches the information to the user interface, the GIS environment and FIWARE Cosmos.
The most valuable part of the platform still is the information itself. The platform’s supervisors will perform geographical analysis thanks to the ArcGIS Online geoprocessing capabilities and pattern analysis with the business intelligence functionalities of FIWARE Spago B-I GE.
The final goal of WiseTown being adopted by the cities is to allow them to:
- Monitor, within a single process, both human generated and IoT generated information.
- Generate a valuable database, connecting heterogeneous systems and gathering information that will be useful for urban planning
- Engage citizens to improve their own city and providing them with real-time feedback on the city issues
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Save management costs and avoid the waste of human resources, reducing:
- The time to resolve each issue that has been proposed as important or problematic
- The time to send each issue to the right person to deal with it, within the municipality
- The time to manage a complete set of issues, thanks to the algorithms that can remove/aggregate redundant/coincident issues
- The targeted clients for the WiseTown solution are, undoubtedly, the cities. By adopting the smart platform that TeamDev has delivered, a city management would accomplish the monitoring of human generated and IoT generated information within a single process, thus creating a valuable database that can interconnect with heterogeneous systems and gather and show information that can be useful for urban planning. WiseTown would also engage the community to improve the city by receiving the data generated by the citizens and giving them back real-time feedback on city issues.
WiseTown ranked as one of the final top projects accelerated by Finodex and has been involved in the FIWARE Mundus initiative and present its solution at the GCTC events in Washington DC and Austin, where the participation was shared with one of WiseTown first customers and early adopters: the City of Perugia.
A great occasion to discover the WiseTown project would be the next and near event organized around the Open Data Accelerators.
This is our story, which is yours?
FIWARE AT THE GCTC'16 – ANDREA CRUCIANNI – WiseTown: City Quality Enhancer from FIWARE on Vimeo.