A smart city development kit for designing Web and mobile Apps

Smart City services' effectiveness is enabled by the integration and availability of data coming from city operators on different domains: mobility, energy, health, water, telecom, tourism, culture, etc. They may be open and private data, static and real time. The most cases, smart city developers still have to develop their applications by studying several data sets and API sources, recovering the data models, reconciliating and aggregating data manually, creating applications exploiting low level Web Service and/or REST Call without the support of development tools, and neither of a semantic data aggregator. In this paper, an innovative tool for smart city web and mobile Apps development is presented. It exploits the Km4City data aggregator and semantic model, and includes: (i) tools for assisting developers for generating calls to Smart City API via visual queries on a graphical user interface; and (ii) open source Apps Development Kit for shortening the development. Finally, the paper reports about experimental results performed in the usage of the tool in the context of a large national project called Sii-Mobility which involved several developers. The same approach is presently adopted by other large projects as well.