A platform for integrating heterogeneous data and developing smart city applications

Developing smart city applications typically faces challenges such as meeting several complex requirements, integrating heterogeneous data sources, and considering geographical information representing the real-world urban space. Smart city platforms have a key role in realizing these applications as they provide high-level services that can be (re)used by developers. Despite the existence of many platforms to support the development of smart city applications, most of them do not associate the offered services with geographical information, do not support performing semantic queries on the available data, and have limitations that may burden development tasks. This paper presents Smart Geo Layers (SGeoL), a platform for developing smart city applications. Besides integrating urban data with geographical information, SGeoL relies on an underlying middleware infrastructure and leverages it by including high-level abstractions for (i) context data management, (ii) integration of heterogeneous data, (iii) semantic support, (iv) data analysis and visualization, and (v) data security and privacy support. This paper also reports experiences on the real use of SGeoL and empirical results on the evaluation of its performance and scalability. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.