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.