Scalable Smart aNalytic APplication Builder for Sentient Cities, the platform proving flexible a method and solution for rapid implementation of smart city applications exploiting heterogeneous data and enabling services for stakeholders by IOT/IOE, data analytics and big data technologies.
Snap4City is a 100% open-source platform used in many cities and areas. It is an official FIWARE Platform and Solution (https://www.snap4city.org/467, https://www.fiware.org/) developed under the coordination of DISIT Lab of the University of Florence, Italy. Snap4City is GDPR compliant, passed PENTest, and it is an EOSC platform, an official Node-RED Library, an official E015 API, etc. The platform is provided as a “Service” basis, or installed in your location (by yourself, as well as using a number of companies), no license fee is needed. The platform has at present a wide range of activities in the smart city and IoT/IoE (Internet of Things/Internet of Everything) integrated domains: defining city strategies, implementing control room, realizing ethics and explainable artificial intelligent solutions and computing key performance indicators which are used daily in both city and industry management.
Snap4City has incorporated Km4City (https://www.km4city.org) ontological and semantic model to guarantee the data interoperability with any kind of IoT Devices, device models, data entities, and physical structures ranging from the city, industry, and home. And thus, also with FIWARE Smart Data Models, providing a number of real-time open-source solutions to support decision-makers in cities and large industries to ground their daily operational actions on solid explainable artificial intelligence predictions, deductions, and assessments. It provides a complete understanding of the context and its trends, receiving an early warning, anomaly detections, and performing simulation and what-if analysis. This information is used to suggest strategic interventions to improve city services and general quality of life, in multiple domains (e.g., Smart Cities and Smart Industry).
The proposed solution is flexible enough to support extensions at different levels of granularity: data, analytics, tools, applications, MicroServices, and IoT brokers. In this regard, the solution uses FIWARE Orion Broker based on NGSI to connect with a large number of devices thanks to the IoT Directory and Km4City Knowledge base. The solution also developed NGSI compliant IoT Edge of several kinds. Snap4City is also compliant with other protocols and models such as MQTT, AMQP, OneM2M, SigFOX, LoraWAN, and many others.
Cities are rapidly transforming their services to address current societal, environmental and economic challenges. Vertical smart solutions are being progressively replaced by solutions capable of exploiting a huge range of data channels, getting smarter, and cross exploiting data. Cities/areas require highly tailored solutions, exploiting the legacy and pushing to the future and innovation. A flexible, dynamic, and highly interoperable platform is needed to increase sustainability, profit, and full control of operational objectives, fully integrated with the territory and all the stakeholders. Cities are abandoning an approach based on single data sources and becoming aware of actual data channels where information and actions flow in multiple directions and Digital Twins and creating living labs with all stakeholders, 3D City and building representation, BIM local and global. Multi-directional flows are key services in implementing the city/area operating system enabling daily tuning to deal with current challenges, mobility as a service, smart waste, smart lighting and smart parking.
Snap4City is operative with services and data in more than 40 cities/areas in countries such as Firenze (IT), Helsinki (FI), Antwerp (BE), Lonato del Garda (IT), Lavagno (IT), Valencia (SP), Pont Du Gard (FR), WestGreece (GR), Mostar (BA), Dubrovnik (KR), Santiago di Compostela (SP), Pisa (IT), Prato (IT), Pistoia (IT), Lucca (IT), Arezzo (IT), Grosseto (IT), Livorno (IT), Siena (IT), Massa (IT), Modena (IT), Cagliari (IT), Venezia (IT), Roma (IT), etc.; and from regions as Tuscany (IT), Garda Lake (IT), Svealand Region (Sweden), Sardegna (IT), Belgium (BE), Finland (Fl), Emilia Romagna (IT), Spain (SP), WestGreece (GR), Occitanie (FR), Bosnia-Herzegovina (BA), Croatia (KR), and many industries.
