City Alerts: smart city notification platform based on public open data [articol]

Abstract

Multiple efforts are being made nowadays to transform crowded, polluted and dormant urban communities into smart cities. As part of this endeavor, citizens rely on efficient and predictable public services to help them to smoothly run their busy lives and public agencies need to work synchronously to deliver performant services to the citizens. When things do not work as expected, as it frequently happens, the solution is to communicate openly and timely these issues, using information systems capable of adapting to the diversity and dynamics of modern cities. In this paper, we show how a platform called City Alerts, that we developed, notifies citizens about the various situations that can cause discomfort and shortnotice change of plans, like gas cutoffs or changes of public transport routes. The strength and novelty of the platform lies in the ability to integrate into a single database heterogeneous data, both in terms of content and format, from various public agencies which provide it as public open data, and to expose it afterwards through open protocols.