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.
