Interoperability in the Smart City: a semantic approach for merging flexibility with strictness

The Smart City paradigm is nowadays the main reference for a sustainable and efficient development of our cities. This development requires the creation of ICT infrastructures and applications for the management of the wide amount of data related to many different sectors like Energy, Transport, Safety, Governance, and many others. Thus, the ability to communicate and exchange data is critical for the realization of Smart City. The risk on the other side is the emerging, from different actors, of a plethora of isolated and closed software solutions not able to communicate each other and to collaborate. In this article we present our semantic approach to enable interoperability between cross-domain Smart City applications. It is the result of a path that applied theoretical principles of interoperability to real requirements and opportunities detected in Smart City scenarios.