A smart city data model based on semantics best practice and principles

Data management is crucial in modern smart cities. A good data model for smart cities has to be able to describe and integrate data from multiple domains, such as geographic in- formation, public transportation, road maintenance, waste collection, and urban faults management. We describe our approach for creating a semantic platform for the Munici- pality of Catania, one of the main cities in Southern Italy. The ultimate goal is to boost the metropolis towards the route of a modern smart city and improve urban life. Our platform exhibits a consistent, minimal and comprehensive semantic data model for the city based on the Linked Open Data paradigm. Both the model and the data are publically accessible thorough dedicated user-friendly services, which allow citizens to observe and interact with the work of the public administration. Our platform also enables interested businesses and programmers to develop front-end services on the top of it. We describe the methodology used to extract data from sources, enrich them, building an ontology that describes them and publish them under the Linked Open Data paradigm. We include in our description employed tools and technologies. Our methodology is based on the standards of the W3C, on good practices of ontology design, on the guidelines issued by the Agency for Digital Italy and the Italian Index of Public Administration, as well as on the in-depth experience of the researchers in this field.