Presentation given by Jaime Ventura, Porto Digital, at Open & Agile Smart Cities' annual Connected Smart Cities & Communities Conference 2020 on 23 January in Brussels, Belgium.

1. PortoDigital©2018PortoDigital©2018
Jan 2020
OPERATING URBAN DATA
PLATFORMS BASED ON MINIMAL
INTEROPERABILITY MECHANISMS
MIMs In Porto’s Urban Platform

2. About Porto
• Largest city in the north of Portugal (second in the country);
• 250 thousand inhabitants ;
• 1.8 million in the metropolian area;
In the context of smart cities:
• Founding Member of OASC;
• Core Pilot City in the SynchroniCity LSP;
• Signatory of TMForum’s "City as a Platform Manifesto”;
• Joined Front-Runner Smart Cities program (from FIWARE/TM Forum);

3. About Porto Digital
• Porto Digital Association is a private non-profit association;
• It was created in 2004 by the Municipality of Porto, the University of Porto
and the Portuguese Business Association (AEP), in cooperation with the
company Metro of Porto;
• Created to promote ICT projects within the context of the city of Porto and
its metropolitan area.

4. Where do we stand
STATUS: (Finishing) Exploring & Planning for Urban Data Platform.
• Porto took the path of experiementing and piloting before building
• We often see providers showing off with beautiful dasboards, but its when we get to the integration phase
(specionally when there’s legacy system or devices), things get a bit diferent.
• If we want to rely decision making on it, we better understand it fully (no shady corners, no hidden surprises.)
• If we want to include clauses in tenders, for service providers to connect to it, we need (deep) knowledge to
support integration and validation.
• Pilot projects tend to work pretty well, but going live/production is a diferent story (pilots tend to address
simple scenarios)

5. Porto’s Urban Platform
• OASC gave us the guidelines and principles;
• SynchroniCity provided a reference architecture and implementation;
• FIWARE (one of the promoters of FrontRunner Cities Program) provided software solution to implement
and use it.
* Actually, Synchronicity also provided valuable, reusable software: Atomic Services.

6. What’s Context Data?
TRAFFIC
50 Cars/minute
TRAFFIC
23 Cars/minute
311
Damaged traffic
light
NOISE
30 dBa
AIR
QUALITY
CO: 318
NO2: 71.4
311
pothole
Weather
Temperature: 17º
Wind: 30m/s
Weather
Temperature: 18º
Wind: 10m/s
PARKING
SPOT
Status:
occupied
TRAFFIC
31 Cars/minute
PARKING
SPOT
free
NOISE
30 dBa
NOISE
10 dBa

7. Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms
• How do I get/update Data?
• In what schema(datamodel) is it stored/available?
• How do I make it available, so that others can use it to build solutions?
• How do I secure it?
• How do I store its history ?

8. Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms
MIM MIM Name
Interoperability
Point
Description
1
OASC Context
Information
Management MIM
Context
Information
Management API
This API allows to access to real-time context information from
different cities.
2
OASC Data
Models MIM
Shared Data
Models
Guidelines and catalogue of common data models in different
verticals to enable interoperability for applications and
systems among different cities
3
OASC Ecosystem
Transaction
Management MIM
(“Marketplace”)
Marketplace API
The API exposes functionalities such as a catalogue
management, ordering management, revenue management,
Service Level Agreements (SLA), license management, etc.
Complemented by marketplaces for services, hardware and
training.
4 Security Security API
API to register and authenticate users and applications in order
to access services.
5 Storage Data Storage API
This API allows to access to historical data and open data of
cities.
Synchronicity

9. Porto’s Urban Platform
1
1
2
3

10. Some Challenges in Porto
• Detecting and addressing unplanned issues in the street (car accidents, road blocks, damage in traffic
light, …
• Provide valuable information about weather (temperature, rain, wind), air quality,
• Predicting road conditions based on historical data and forecast data (expect traffic on a road nearby
a music concert, weather conditions, …);
• Delivering alert and/or live data to the citizens and help them making better choices (can I take the
bus to get there?);
• …

11. Testing goals (regarding MIMs)
Data Ingestion
• Data of different types
• Data from the same type, coming from similar sources, but from different providers
• Data from the same type, coming from different sources (and, obviously, different providers)
Data consumption/access, processing and publication
• Backend access, frontend access (by request and by subscription),
• Processing streams of data, detecting outliers, processing data from the same type with different
observation periods.
• Having data available in opendata portal, data marketplace,…
Other
• Determine points of failure and or weaknesses of such platform implementation
• Test the elasticity of the technical solutions
• Test having tenders with clauses about data standard compliance (namely NGSI)

12. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)
Civic issues tracking system allows the municipality to address abnormal situations on the city.
Currently, we have multiple sources for acknowledging these issues:
• Citizens and Municipality staff
• Video analytics
• Analytics over context data

13. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)
Abandoned
objects

14. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)
Vehicles
Parked in
non-parking
area

15. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)
Obstacles on
the crosswalk

16. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)
Obstacles (vehicles)
on the bus lane

17. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)

18. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)

19. Example 1: Civic issues tracking (311)

20. Example 2: Monitoring weather conditions

21. Example 2: Monitoring weather conditions

22. Example 2: Monitoring weather conditions
community stations

23. Example 2: Monitoring weather conditions

24. Example 2: Monitoring weather conditions

25. Example 3: Monitoring and predicting traffic conditions

26. Example 3: Monitoring and predicting traffic conditions

27. Example 4: Multimodal Transportation Application

28. Example 4: Multimodal Transportation Application

29. Example 4: Multimodal Transportation Application

30. PortoDigital©2018PortoDigital©2018
Thank you
Jaime.ventura@portodigital.pt
www.portodigital.pt