The concept of Urban Open Platform originates to the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and communities (EIP SCC). The EIP SCC has defined six Action Clusters as their key priority areas, including “Integrated Infrastructures and Open Data”. A general observation is that open urban platforms are a prerequisite to support fast take-up of smart solutions in cities to allow many stakeholders of a city to participate. It is also expected that the urban platforms would have a key role in the integration of third-party vendor solutions.
The urban platform initiative was supported by launching a Memorandum of Understanding that had 85 signatories, including both cities and smart city related vendors. In 2016 it was estimated that the Urban Platforms were fragmented, had uncertainties on the demand side and were lacking interoperability and common standards from the supplier side. At the moment, there is still work to do on all these areas.
The Urban Platform concept has evolved through several Horizon 2020 and ERDF funded projects. Forum Virium Helsinki has worked on the concept in projects such as bIoTope (688203), mySMARTLife (731297), Select4Cities (688196) and SynchroniCity (732240). In many of the projects, the usage of the Urban Platform has focused on being an IoT platform with dashboards. The support of spatial data and large-scale data utilization have been somewhat limited and many of the pilots were experimental platform products not ready nor intended to be in full-scale production use. The limited vision of the scope has also missed the opportunity in supporting the cities in some of their new data-related responsibilities such as maintaining INSPIRE -compliant data services and providing support for SECAP -reporting. The Urban Platform should also not be seen as a monolithic, single service but as a distributed and decoupled collection of services that can complement the already existing data platforms that the cities have. In both Helsinki and Tallinn, a key question is how can the urban platform build on top of the Microsoft Azure data lakes and data warehouses that both the cities are already invested in.
In the FINEST Twins -project, the role of the Urban Open Platform is to both support the research streams, piloting programs and the actual use cases coming from the cities of Helsinki and Tallinn. This document explains the key elements of the design and implementation of the platform, including also description of the recommended operational model with the governance processes explained.
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This project has received funding from the Estonian government (Ministry of Education and Research) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 856602. |
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