Why Snap4City should be adopted and why it can be easy replicated / installed
Smart Cities need to set up a flexible Living Lab to cope with the city evolution in terms of services and city users’ needs and capabilities. Snap4City solution (https://www.snap4city.org ) provides a flexible method and solution to quickly create the infrastructure supporting a large range of smart city services. It exploits heterogeneous data and legacy solutions and enables the creation of services for stakeholders by using IOT/IOE and big data technologies. Snap4City applications support multiple paradigms as data driven, stream and batch processing, putting in the hands of: (i) Living Lab users a set of solutions to develop applications without vendor lock-in neither technology lock-in, (ii) final users customizable mobile Apps and tools, (iii) decision makers and developers, specialized city dashboards and sophisticated IOT/IOE applications for logic control. Snap4City satisfies all the expected requirements of Select4Cities, ENOLL, and EIP and much more, it is fully open source, patent free, supports cloud and scalability on processing and applications, can be installed on cloud or on premise, respects user needs and privacy, provides community tools for co-creation; provides MicroServices and easily replaceable tools; support GDPR; provide a set of tools for knowledge and living lab management, and it is a Fi-Ware platform, an official Node-RED Library, a platform on EOSC, etc., and it compliant with more than 50 protocols in the smart city and Industry 4.0 domains.
The most innovative aspects of Snap4City solution are:
- the Wizard: an expert system for immediate application production by matching data vs graphics representation for creating city and personal Dashboards by rendering and acting on data and IOT devices with a large range of graphics widgets; which may have intelligence in the back by means of powerful IOT applications on data flow combining powerful Smart City Microservices, data analytics and API;
- Unified data model capable to unifying POI, KPI, sensors, actuators, heatmap, GIS, personal data, trajectories, tracks, paths, OD matrices, etc.;
- a Semantic Reasoner supporting the modelling of city entities, their semantic relationships and search, for they discovery, IOT discovery, dynamic and autonomous data analytics as machine learning, and for development of applications in multiple domains: mobility and transport, tourism, health, welfare, social, etc. Extending the Km4City multi-domain semantic model (https://www.km4city.org );
- End-2-end encrypted communication, from devices to dashboard, compliant with GDPR privacy/security, mutual authenticated (or other models);
- Data Analytic extensible by using multiple programming languages, including: R, Java, C/C++, Python, R Studio and Tensor Flow, exploitable as scheduled processes and/or MicroServices into IOT Applications;
- Flexible and extensible IOT/IOE Applications exploiting External Services, MicroServices and Micro Applications, Data Analytics and tools;
- a wide range of Advanced Smart City APIs and MicroServices and modalities to create traditional and advanced Web and Mobile Applications and services;
- IOT Directory and service simplifying the creation of Applications abstracting complexity of IOT Devices, IOT Edge, IOT Brokers, protocols and data formats, exploiting the Semantic Reasoner;
- Open Source IOT Devices, IOT Edge on Android, Arduino, Rasperry PI, Linux, Windows, ESP32, PAXCounter, etc., with mutual authentication and encrypted communication, and IOT Application control from web page;
- Tools for Living Lab coworking, sharing, and delegating: data, resource, IOT devices, IOT Edge, heatmaps, IOT Applications, dashboards, blogs, articles, videos, external services, micro applications, MicroServices, social interaction, etc.;
- usable on cloud and on premise with your private installation is 100% open source;
- Modular, secure, elastic scalability and robustness by design are also provided with automated scaling for IOT applications, Data Analytics, data processing and ingestion;
- Ready to use Appliance for a number of modules and tools.
In More Details, the most innovative aspects of Snap4City open source solution are:
- Dashboards and Wizard (expert system) for creating IOT Smart City applications to:
- work with referral and real time data from IOT Brokers;
- manage and show a large range of data kind such as: referral, POI, open data, external services from web pages, external rest call services, micro application, social media tools, traffic flow reconstruction tool, health first aid tools, parking predictions, weather forecast, selector and possible fields.
- Manage both sensors and actuators towards IOT Brokers and IOT applications;
- work with IOT Applications data in real time, data driven, back and forwards;
- work with personal data saved by the user in a safe;
- exploit a large number of flexible and also specialized widgets for smart city;
- custom widgets, What-IF analysis, heatmaps;
- fast production of dashboard with 3-4 clicks paradigm.
- IOT applications editor exploiting a large set of more than 150 MicroServices, which can be customized and extended, for creating smart personal applications, also including:
- Advanced Smart City API;
- Data Analytics, which can be easily create in R Studio, Python, ETL, etc.;
- External Services as rest calls;
- Web scraping processes;
- IOT Edge Applications on cloud and on premise
- Multi domain support: mobility, environment, energy, personal, geo, etc.
- Advanced Smart City APIs and corresponding MicroServices for IOT Apps, documented in Swagger and testable, for creating traditional and advanced Web and Mobile Applications and services. Also, a number of Mobile Applications.
- Expressive and flexible knowledge base and tools. This guarantees the semantic interoperability of data managing with an unified semantic reasoner and data model:
- concepts belonging to a variety of domains (mobility, energy, tourism, culture, environment, health, services, etc.),
- variety of devices (IOT brokers, protocols, IOT Edge, etc.),
- belonging to different high-level types: IOT data, referral data, structural information, POI, KPI, heatmaps, OD matrices, trajectories, mobility and transport information, environmental, energy, external services, personal data, etc.,
- interoperable with any kind of IOT device, protocol and format, IOT Edge, etc. via the IOT Directory and connection with the knowledge Base grounded on Km4City.
- Support process of IOT Device registration in bulk, automated update of IOT Device collection, IOT data shadow, etc.;
- Open Software IOT Devices based on Arduino, Raspberry pi, Android, ESP32, etc.
- Supports end-2-end encrypted secure connections (from device to dashboard) which is totally transparent for the users, connection of devices and their usage can be performed without writing any line of code.
- support for IOT Edge/Devices based on Arduino, Raspberry, BeagleBoard, Android, Windows, Linux.
- Support more than 50 protocols in the areas of Smart City and Industry 4.0, including, NGSI, MQTT, HTTPS, WS, WFS, WMS, DATEX, OBD2, MobBus, OPC, COAP, AMQP, OneM2M, TLS, SSL, etc.
- Development of DataAnalytics solutions (statistic, logic, semantic and machine learning; for predictive, anomaly detection, descriptive analysis, etc.), which are made accessible as MicroServices and API for IOT Applications and Dashboard. Developing them via: R Studio, Java, Python, C/C++, etc.
- Distribution of a large set of ready to use Data Analytics: prediction, anomaly detection, OD matrices, heatmaps, traffic flow, routing, environmental data comparison, etc.
- Making them directly accessible as MicroServices in short time and easy manner.
- Supports the Living Lab concepts with tools for: management, development, co-working, collaborative tools, such as Resource Manager (market place for experiences and solutions), Dashboard Builder, IOT Applications, Process Scheduling, DataGate, and community support (www.snap4city.org portal)
- Supports GDPR with the capability of managing and controlling a large number of DataTypes, and for most of them also the delegation to view, and the change of ownership. Data Type as: IOT App, Dashboard, IOT Devices, MyKPI, Data, Trajectories, POI, etc.