A Unified Knowledge Model for Managing Smart City/IoT Platform Entities for Multitenant Scenarios

Abstract

Smart city/IoT frameworks are becoming more complex for the needs regarding multi-tenancy, data streams, real-time event-driven processing, data, and visual analytics. The infrastructures also need to support multiple organizations and optimizations in terms of data, processes/services, and tools cross-exploited by multiple applications and developers. In this paper, we addressed these needs to provide platform operators and developers effective models and tools to: (i) identify the causes of problems and dysfunctions at their inception; (ii) identify references to data, processes, and APIs to add/develop new scenarios in the infrastructure, minimizing effort; (iii) monitor resources and the work performed by developers to exploit the complex multi-application platform. To this end, we developed a semantic unified knowledge model, UKM, and a number of tools for its implementation and exploitation. The UKM, with its inferences, allows to browse and extract information from complex relationships among entities. The proposed solution has been designed, implemented, and validated in the context of the open source Snap4City.org platform and applied in many geographical areas with 18 organizations, 40 cities, thousands of operators and developers, and free trials to keep platform complexity under control, as in the interconnected scenarios of the Herit-Data Interreg Project, which is a lighthouse project of the European Commission.