Data driven reference architecture for smart city ecosystems

With the convergence of information and telecommunication technologies, the vision of the `Smart City' is fast becoming a reality. City governments in a growing number of countries are capitalizing on these advances to enhance the lives of their citizens and to increase efficiency and sustainability. In this paper, we elaborate on smartCityRA, a reference architecture for Smart City projects, which serves as the design language for creating smart cities blueprints. Such a blueprint caters for diverse stakeholders, devices, platforms, and technologies. We report on our experience in carrying out a proof-of-concept use case with a major telecommunication provider in the UAE. In doing so, we refined our multiple-view model of the initial smartCityRA reference architecture. We show that Data in smart city applications drive the entire development lifecycle and should be considered early in the development cycle. In addition, Data affects all the other views in the smartCityRA and hence the Data View needs to be at the heart of the entire smartCityRA. Realizing the Data view using a component like a Data Hub helped in creating a central integration location for disparate data from different sources, thus reliving developers from dealing with several entities individually. Finally, we show that any smart city reference architecture, like smartCityRA, should be at the right level of abstraction to enable the flexibility of adoption and adaptation by different stakeholders and components.