Snap4City Abstract: the most innovative and advanced aspects

  

 

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:

• Dashboards highly interative and secure managing multidomain data and data kind for Smart Cities and industry 4.0: maps, 3D, digital twin, selectors, OD matrices, trajectories, time series, weather, wind direction, semaphore, gauge, buttons, gear, tables, trends, heatmap, traffic flow, air quality predictions, bars, multiple bars, animations, chords, hierarchies, multistaked, synoptics, custom widgets, interactive widgets, etc.;
  • 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;
  • Skinned and style Dashboards: easy to change the skin and style of dashboard to have your precise fitting on your applications and portals. 
  • Synoptics and custom widgets, for real time rendering data on graphical scenographic tools, and for graphic interation on the systems from dashboard to actuators end-to-end secure connection.
• Data Models
  • Semantic Reasoner supporting the modelling of city entities in multiple and federate knowledge base, 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 ); Federation of Smart Cities via smart city API for large horizontal scaling and world scale coverage without expensive solutions. 
  • Unified data model (exploited in the Wizard and Knowledge base) capable to unifying: FIWARE smart data models, Maps, POI, KPI/myKPI, sensors, actuators, heatmaps, GIS WFS/WMS, personal data, trajectories, tracks, paths, OD matrices, statistics, traffic flow, predictions, 3D models, BIM, 3D openGL models, etc., in any domain, format and size;
  • 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, addressing FIWARE Smart Data Models, Snap4City IoT Device Models, and any custom model you may have; Attaching in few minutes External Brokers and registering IoT Devices into the platform.
  • Open Source code for implementing and connecting IoT Devices and IoT Edge on Android, Arduino, Raspberry PI, Linux, Windows, ESP32, Arm, AXIS cameras, etc., with mutual authentication and encrypted communication, and IOT App control from web page;
• Processing and smartening applications
  • Data Analytic extensible by using multiple programming languages, including: R-studio, Java, C/C++, Python, and Tensor Flow, Map Reduce, exploitable as scheduled processes and/or MicroServices into IOT Applications; Mukltiple paradigms: semantics, machine learning, operative research, statistics, and mixed. Ready to use solutions for predictions, anomaly detection, detection, classifications, etc. in Traffic, pollutant, people  moving, etc. 
  • Specific additional tools: BIM digital twin, reports generators, video stream management, API accounting and billing, federation of solutions via smart city API, satellite data ingestion and processing, automated Open Data production and ingestion, open to any customization from your  developers, integrated tiketing management and workflow,
  • Applications: smart parking, smart biking, smart light, control systems, control room, energy management, smart bed, smart manufacturing, smart building, mobility and transport, security, etc.
  • Flexible and extensible IOT Applications (IOE, Internet of Everything) exploiting External Services, MicroServices and Micro Applications, Data Analytics and tools, FIWARE smart data models;
  • development of custom smart applications: exploiting dashboards, data analysis, node-red for business logic and the large variety of graphical widgets.
  • Advanced Smart City APIs and MicroServices and modalities to create traditional and advanced Web and Mobile Applications and services, all on Node-RED platform on IoT Edge and on Cloud;
• On Line development tools, from data modeling to data ingestion, from data transformation to data analytics, and from dashboard to realize business intelligence tools. 
• Living Lab coworking tools, sharing, and delegating: data, resource, IOT devices, IOT Edge, heatmaps, IOT Applications, dashboards, blogs, articles, videos, external services, micro applications, MicroServices, social interaction, etc.;
• End-2-end encrypted communication, from devices to dashboard, compliant with GDPR privacy/security, mutual authenticated (or other models), PEN test passed;
• Ready to use Appliance Virtual Machines and/or Containers for a modules and tools, free of license, several different configuration from Micro to Large.
  • usable on cloud and on premise with your private installation is 100% open source, easy to install from VM and Docker Compose which are provided free of licence;
• Modular, secure, elastic scalability and robustness by design are also provided with automated scaling for IOT applications, Data Analytics, data processing and ingestion;

 

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.