An integrated platform for managing information in smart cities

This article focuses on defining the integrated platform for managing information in smart cities. We look into the smart city platforms that are increasingly used in today's cities all around the world. Smart city platforms can be deployed on private, public or hybrid clouds, remote servers or onsite. By definition, a smart city platform integrates many different functional areas of the smart city in a single environment. The Smart city platform offers integrated functionality to coordinate intelligent city data, applications, solutions and services at one or more operational levels between multiple stakeholders with integrated functionality. By monitoring and analysing the use of urban assets, the government can distribute them to improve operational efficiency. The platform provides middle-ware and operational functionality across multiple software and hardware, integrates multiple communication protocols, and provides latent and free solutions for smart cities. Managing the huge amounts of data generated by IoT-based sensors and systems is a main challenge facing end users and providers. We show that smart city platforms serve to standardize data and information across many silo systems. It is demonstrated that they provide a common mechanism for visualizing and managing data to optimize the entire urban operation.