Data-driven Ecosystems in Smart Cities: A Living Example from Seestadt Aspern

The new data collection opportunities offered by IoT and the recent advancements in data processing infrastructure have provided a significant impulse to the development of smart cities. Although reliable data collection and analysis is a fundamental prerequisite for urban intelligence, the smartness of a smart city also depends on the ability to translate IoT data into useful and innovative services: it is important to conceive new design principles for the development of applications for smart cities and IoT. To this extent, this paper presents a simplified conceptual framework for describing smart city ecosystems based on concepts of natural ecosystems. The goal of the framework is to derive new metaphors for designing IoT applications based on the observation of communication and interaction patterns in natural ecosystems. The proposed framework is used to describe a real smart city project in Vienna, Austria.