Data Integration for Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges

Current modern cities are equipped with sensors generating huge amounts of data waiting to be tapped for "smart" decision making such as smart grid, smart transportation, smart buildings and smart healthcare. However, these data are not readily analyzable due to the heterogeneity of data types and formats from "vertical silos" smart city systems. In this paper, the existing related work in progress of smart city data sharing and integration are enumerated and the key technical challenges and limitations are identified and highlighted. We propose a bottom-up publish/subscribe data sharing and integration model to overcome the technical challenges and limitations in cross-domain integration of smart city data. A data representation scheme and Application Programming Interface (API) based prototype application are currently under development. The proposed model shows a promising prospect for facilitating smart city data sharing and extraction, transformation and loading when fully implemented.