Data Integration in a Smart City: A Real Case

The introduction and continuous integration of Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented technologies in urban environments leads to enhanced solutions in several domains (such as mobility, health, energy management, environmental monitoring, etc.), thus making a city “smart” and ultimately benefiting the everyday life of its citizens. As IoT systems are widely known to be producers of (often a very large amount of) heterogeneous data, in this chapter we discuss a modular and scalable approach to handle IoT-based data collection and management in a real smart city case, namely, that of the city of Parma, Italy. The proposed IoT infrastructure, the core component of which is a logical processing entity, acting as middleware and denoted as “city2i®,” in charge of “digesting” the heterogeneous information generated by multiple data sources, allows the municipality to monitor the city status (from multiple perspectives) and to highlight “hidden” correlations among collected data.