LaodingBot/files/core_requirements_part1.txt

                                           Sub-Goal 5: User’s experience is
                                            enhanced by the provision of                Use Cases: 3   Requirements: 8
                                                value-added services



                                                                Figure 2 Structure of this document.




1.6 Product Scope and Perspective
The EIP Project’s urban platform is an open common architecture which serves for city data
collection, management and distribution. An urban platform is intended to support the widespread
exploitation of city data by humans and machines in the urban environment. Figure 3 illustrates a
holistic high level overview of the urban platform the EIP project intends to deliver.
Requirements Specification for Urban Platforms (EIP_SCC Initiative)                                      Page 6



The reference architecture for urban platforms should:

•      Cater for interoperability between urban infrastructures
•      Enable replicability of the solutions/platforms city to city
•      Scale without technical constraints and excessive cost increase
•      Provide open APIs and SDKs
•      Enable Real Time capabilities
•      Support implementation of functional and technical capabilities




                 Figure 3. High level overview of the urban platform (currently approved EC DG CNECT).


The current urban platform market is nascent. Many software vendors offer such a platform, though
many requirements and expectations of the stakeholders of city data are not (fully) addressed. As
a result, current urban platforms are often more costly to design and maintain, less reusable and
often not interoperable platform-to-platform, and susceptible to information fragmentation and
overload.

The urban platform which the EIP initiative intends to design takes a step beyond the platforms
currently on the market by ensuring the requirements are fully founded on a co-created and
common set of representative city needs, from which it solicits suitable industry input, and an open
and managed collaboration between industry, cities and communities, and others, in order to take
into account their needs and concerns. To do this, it is necessary to take a technology agnostic
approach to design an open and common reference architecture for urban platforms. This platform
must ensure data is collected and sustained in accordance with well-stablished standards,
managed in a robust manner so that it can handle high level supply and demand of data, and
distributed across different value chains, systems and stakeholders. The ability to handle high level
of city data supply and demand while being user secure and accessible enough for city-wide
exploitation of data is one of many keys to the success of urban platforms. This is central to the
design and implementation of urban platforms.
Requirements Specification for Urban Platforms (EIP_SCC Initiative)                                               Page 7


1.7 The Urban Platform Development Stack
The requirements specification of this document is based on the Urban Platform Development
Stack illustrated in Figure 4. The stack is composed by five domains (represented as layers in the
stack) necessary to fully implement an urban platform software suite as shown in Table 1. Each
domain comprehends a set of requirements necessary to the design of a common and open urban
data service platform. The elicited requirements are used to define a technical architecture which is
simple enough to be comprehensible at least at a high level of abstraction. The platform should be
conceptually decomposable into its major subsystems, the platform’s functionality reused by many
services and external applications should be identifiable, and interactions between the platform
and services, data providers and data consumers should be well defined and explicit.

The first layer of the stack “Societal needs” concerns to outcomes we strive for within a portfolio of
city service domains. An urban platform should recognise societal needs and wants as the starting
point for city data service offering. Ultimately, an urban platform aims to provide tailor made and
compelling engaging services for the users. The Services and Business models layers concerns
with delivering data services which carefully targets the needs and expectations of the different
users of the urban platform, and explore use cases and commercial models where data is used to
deliver different forms of value. The city data layer concerns with the mechanisms necessary to
transform urban platforms into a foundation for widespread exploitation of data, including handling
data architectural features, data usability, semantics and quality aspects. The urban platform layer
concerns to the technology foundation to configure, share, and interpret exponentially increasing
volumes city data and services. Finally, the Infrastructure layer concerns with the base level
connectivity that supports the platform to be scalable and reliable in the long run.



                STACK                       OUTPUT

                                           Requirements to deliver new digital services that will address the
                Societal Needs             societal needs of cities in a positive manner that relates to political
                                           narratives.


                  Services &               Requirements to new profitable business models and the development
               Business Models             of an increase range of new and engaging services in the smart cities.



                  City Data                Requirements to provide all city data stakeholders ready access and
                                           delivery of all city data that unpins the decision making process in smart
                                           cities.


               Urban Platform               Requirements to put in place applications together to build a foundation
                                            for the widespread exploitation of data.


                Infrastructure             Requirements to deliver the backbone infrastructure that will be used to
                                           capture the opportunities of digital technology and data to enable
                                           transformation.


                                 Figure 4. Urban Platform Development Stack.
Requirements Specification for Urban Platforms (EIP_SCC Initiative)                                 Page 8


 Table 1. Urban Platform Development Stack
 Layer                        Rationale
 Societal Needs               - Accessible services and data necessary to solve social problems
                              and drive innovation;
                              - Parameters that influence user’s experience while interacting with
                              services (e.g. usability, feeling of security and trust);
 Services and Business        - Tailor-made data services which careful targets the needs of users
 Models                       and businesses;
                              - New potential and cost-effective beneficial services that could be
                              rolled out across cities of different sizes;
                              - Use cases where data is used to deliver different forms of value.
 City Data                    - Data architectural features (e.g. volume, variety, temporal factors
                              and sensitivity);
                              - Data licensing, policies and regulations to exploit data to full effect;
                              - Minimum metadata requirements;
                              - Data usability and reusability aspects of humans and machines.
 Urban Platform               - Holistic and interoperable solutions;
                              - Integrated approaches which ensures that services fit together and
                              that synergies can be exploited;
                              - Data management mechanisms to ensure data integrity and
                              compliance with data protection regulations
                              - Extension capabilities to accommodate additional functionality at
                              later stage at a fair and transparent cost.



1.8 User Classes, Characteristics, and User Access
The users of the Urban Platform include end-users, such as the general Public, public and private
organisations; data providers; service providers; and the platform providers who will be
working with the providers of city data and services, and managing the content, defining policies
and regulations of the platform. A crucial feature of an urban platform is the provision of the
various access levels required by the different types of users. Particular uses need different
access levels to some data than the general public. Data publishers will require access to the
Urban Platform in order to ingest, administer, manage, preserve and access their resources. This
will require multiple levels of access to city data and its respective metadata. Table 2 provides a
description of each class of users.


 Table 2. Actors
 User Class        Rationale
 Platform          - Maintains the ecosystem of data, services and users;
 Provider          - Defines standards, licenses and regulations and provides terms and conditions
                   for platform usage and the commercial exploitation of data and services;
                   - Decides who are allowed to join the value network of data and services
                   providers;
 City Data         - Publishes open and proprietary data into the platform;
 Publisher         - Manages and maintain resources in the platform accordingly to terms and
                   conditions.
 Data              - Deploys open and commercial data services into the platform (e.g. data
 Services          visualisation, data cleansing, data integration tools);
 Provider          - Manages and maintain resources in the platform accordingly to terms and
                   conditions.
Requirements Specification for Urban Platforms (EIP_SCC Initiative)                              Page 9


    City Data     - Consumes open and proprietary data provided in the platform;
    Consumer      - Uses open and commercial data services provided in the platform;
                  - Provides feedback on data and services provision;


1.8.1 End-User Access

City data consumers will need to access and use the city data residing in the Urban Platform. End-
users will be able to search metadata and full text within datasets (when available), and obtain city
data in open formats readily available to both humans and machines such as CSV, XML, JSON.
Some end-users may require different access rights to city data. The 2 major end-user groups that
have been identified are:

•     Open data users, including both national and international users (humans and machines).
      Open access to some city data may be restricted by licensing terms (e.g. commercial data),
      embargo periods, copyright, etc.

•     Private data users, which need to use the Urban Platform to obtain commercial city data. Data
      access is available via data subscriptions or when purchase requirements and licenses are
      waived by the data provider.


1.8.2 City Data Publisher Access

A broad data provider level access is needed for stakeholders (humans and machines) working
with the urban platform and their respective data in it. Basically, data publishers will carry out the
following activities:
• Data publication access, available to publishers adding new data and metadata, checking the
     quality of datasets, manipulating data, performing format conversions, defining data-access
     level, tariff for consumption when applicable, and licences.

•     Data maintenance access, for publishers reviewing or editing appropriate data and metadata in
      the urban platform. Data publishers can view data and add to or edit metadata without
      changing the data itself. They should be provided with access to feedback from users to
      investigate problem in their resources (e.g. missing data, inconsistent metadata), and statistical
      information about how their resources are used by users.


1.8.3 Data Services Provider Access

This is the second most restrictive access level providing rights to deploy services in the platform.
Basically, data service providers will carry out the following activities:

•     Data services deployment access, available to service providers adding new mechanisms or
      integrating new applications, testing and validating integration, defining data-access level and
      tariff for service usage.

•     Data services maintenance access, for services providers reviewing, extending or editing
      applications in the urban platform. Data services providers can view their services deployed
      and add to or edit access level and tariff without having to deploy the services again. They
      should be provided with access to feedback from users to investigate problem in their services
      (e.g. bugs, scalability issues), and statistical information about how their services are used by
      users.
Requirements Specification for Urban Platforms (EIP_SCC Initiative)                         Page 10


1.8.4 Platform Provider Access

This is the most restrictive access level providing ultimate rights to the system and is required for
its management, development, and assigning appropriate rights to data and services providers.
Policies and regulations, license agreements are also defined by the provider of the urban
platform. Platform providers should be provided with the means to follow up on civic engagement
(e.g. feedback, request for city data) and on the provision of city data and services.


1.9 User Documentation
•   City Data Consumers: Provide license terms and conditions associated to consuming
    data and services provided in the platform, documentation of APIs and guide to
    discover city data in the platform.
•   City Data Providers: Provide data publication documentation describing the minimum
    metadata requirements, formats accepted, step-by-step guide to publish accurate city
    data.
•   Data Service Providers: Disclosure technical and architecture blueprint details in
    order share and outsource expertise, and partnerships, and integrate supporting
    partners’ solutions into the platform itself.


1.10 Design and Implementation Constraints
1.10.1 Design Constraints

•   Lack of standards agreement for metadata representation.