Web Information Streams Enhancer for your Town.
Smart Cities | Solution
THE CHALLENGE
Recent studies have shown that data generated in the world doubles every year. Most of this information concerns our daily life and should be of interest to 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, nor deal with the citizens’ requests surrounding 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, as data is the key point to activate Civic Technologies and to make them really effective.
THE SOLUTION
More than a single web application, WiseTown, which stands for ‘Web Information Streams Enhancer for your Town’, is a whole ecosystem that offers analytics and management functionalities that can support future urban planning and the ease of handling real-time events and contingencies. 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.
WHY FIWARE
WiseTown collects information from several data sources and WISE orchestrator manages this process: the module that interacts with the social connectors, the external APIs and the others data sources.
In this phase the orchestrator uses FIWARE Orion Context Broker to connect the platform with the CKAN-based open data, NGSI to connect IoT sensors feeds, and it uses Orion notifications to feed the APIs exposed for the integration with other software.
WiseTown Engine analyses and ranks data, after which it aggregates them. It is also responsible for assigning the ownership of the information to the right office. When data are acquired and well categorized, WiseTown starts its core work: the management and analysis of the problem reports. WiseTown 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 Cosmos.
All the processed information are ingested in FIWARE Cosmos thanks to the Cygnus connector. The most valuable part of the platform is the information it collects about the reports and their management: supervisors of the platform will perform geographical analysis thanks to the ArcGIS Online geoprocessing capabilities and pattern analyses with the business intelligence functionalities of FIWARE Spago B-I GE.
USE CASE
An early adopter of WiseTown is the City of Perugia, in Italy. The City chose to work with WiseTown to suggest to its citizens, the possible improvements it could make in order to receive feedback on these improvements from them. For this, they used a specific feature of WiseTown, ‘WiseTown Crowd Planning’.
‘Crowd Planning’ allows local governments to inform its citizens about several topics, in this case, possible improvements they want to implement. The citizens can hereby react and add information, or offer further suggestions on how to improve these new ideas. In turn, the City of Perugia used WiseTown to collect information from sensors, from its citizens, and from third party solutions, to then analyze them together in order to detect potential issues and to improve the quality of life of its citizens. The data model that they built together with WiseTown will remain useful in the future because even third parties, such as private businesses will be able to use the information collected for their own purposes.
Thanks to FIWARE, WiseTown was able to adapt this model to acquire different data sources and to collect them in one single data model.