The digitisation of society emerge in all sectors, and the key driver to all this is the abundance of data that needs to be brought into context and use.

When discussing digitisation, people commonly think in data highways and server farms as being the infrastructure. Access to comprehensive information resources is increasingly becoming a commodity, enabling and enhancing societal living conditions. To achieve this, sense-making of data has to be in integrative part of the digital infrastructure. Reflecting this to traditional patterns, digital roads need junctions, signs and semaphores to function, just as their physical counterparts.

The ambition with AI and smart society and cities should be for the benefit of its inhabitants, but without a blueprint to get a coherent model that will be working in all these utilities, it will all break. Second to this, benevolence, participation and sustainability, have to be the overarching theme, to contrast dystopian visions with citizen surveillance and fraudulent behaviour.

Data needs context to make sense and create value, and this frame of reference will be realised through domain models of the world, with shared vocabularies to disambiguate concepts. In short a semantic layer. It is impossible to boil the ocean, which makes us rather lean toward a layered approach.

All complex systems (or complex adaptive system, CAS) revolve around a set of autonomous agents, for example, cells in a human body or citizens in an urban city. The emergent behaviour in CAS is governed by self-organising principles. A City Information Architecture is by nature a CAS, and hence the design has to be resilient and coherent.

What infrastructural dimensions should a smart city design build upon?

• Urban Environment, the physical spaces comprised of geodata means, register of cadastre (real-estate), roads and other things in the landscape.
• Movable Objects, with mobile sensing platforms capturing things like vehicles, traffic and more, in short, the dynamics of a city environment.
• Human actor networks, the social economic mobility, culture and community in the habitat
• Virtual Urban Systems augmented and immersive platforms to model the present or envision future states of the city environment

Each of these organising systems and categories holds many different types of data, but the data flows also intertwine. Many of the things described in the geospatial and urban environment domain, might be enveloped in a set of building information models (BIM) and geographical information systems (GIS). The resource descriptions link the objects, moving from one building to a city block or area. Similar behaviour will be found in the movable object’s domain because the agents moving around will by nature do so in the physical spaces. So when building information infrastructures, the design has to be able to cross-boundaries with linked-models for all useful concepts. One way to express this is through a city information model (CIM).

When you add the human actor networks layer to your data, things will become messy. In an urban system, there are many organisations and some of these act as public agencies to serve the citizens all through the life and business events. This socially knitted interaction model, use the urban environment and in many cases moveble objects. The social life of information when people work together, co-act and collaborate, become the shared content continuum.
Lastly, data from all the above-mentioned categories also feeds into the virtual urban system, that either augment the perceived city real environment, or the city information modelling used to create instrumental scenarios of the future state of the complex system.

Everything is deeply intertwingled

Connect people and things using semantics and artificial intelligence (AI) companions. There will be no useful AI without a sustainable information architecture (IA). Interoperability on all levels is the prerequisite; systemic (technical and semantic),  organisational (process and climate).

Only when we follow the approach of integration and the use of a semantic layer to glue together all the different types and models – thereby linking heterogeneous information and data from several sources to solve the data variety problem – are we able to develop an interoperable and sustainable City Information Model (CIM).

Such model can not only be used inside one city or municipality – it should be used also to interlink and exchange data and information between cities as well as between cities and provinces, regions, countries and societal digitalisation transformation.

A semantic layer completes the four-layered Data & Content Architecture that usual systems have in place:

Fig.: Four layered content & data architecture

Use standards (as ISA2), and meld them into contextual schemas and models (ontologies), disambiguate concepts and link these with verbatim thesauri and taxonomies (i.e SKOS). Start making sense and let AI co-act as companions (Deep-learning AI) in the real and virtual smart city, applying semantic search technologies over various sources to provide new insights. Participation and engagement from all actor-networks will be the default value-chain, the drivers being new and cheaper, more efficient smart services, the building block for the city innovation platform.

The recorded webinar and also the slides presented

Fredric Landqvist research blog
Peter Voisey
Martin Kaltenböck
Sebastian Gabler