iCityServices

Today more than half of all people live in urban areas. By the middle of the 21st century, the urban population will almost double, increasing from approximately 3.4 billion in 2009 to 6.4 billion in 2050. Cities all over the world are facing formidable challenges in the area of liveability, sustainability and economic prosperity. iCityServices addresses core challenges in managing city resources through a novel, bottom-up platform design that allows the effective integration of data and services across multiple domains and sectors. Current centralistic approaches fail in the complex context that is the city ecosystem. The core innovation that enables a bottom-up, decentralised approach consists of a layered, rule-based system, able to deal with governance, security and ownership of cross-domain city services issues at the appropriate level. The bottom-up nature of the platform design enables innovative ways to involve users in the platform design and the mash-up of third party services. Finally, exploiting innovations in semantic-based reasoning will enhance intelligent and personalised ways of interacting with end-users.