IEEE – SC Workshop:
Table 1 – Open & Big Data
Premise
This document aims to
Analyze the state of the art on Open and Big Data on the basis of the assessments from the Smart City national rankings
Deepen the analysis of the status of the Open and Big Data actions of the City of Trento on the basis of knowledge and internal evaluation of the City Administration
Define the objectives to improve the actions based on Open and Big Data
Build the connection with other area of actions
Design/schedule a Smart City project development
Analysis of the current situation
The current situation of Trento evidences the following situation:
Indicators Status
Open Data website Open data section on the institutional website of the City
+
Trento open data section on the Trentino open data catalog dati.trentino.it
Open Data Planning Not yet defined as integral part of the overall plan. Only ad-hoc actions
Datasets published as open data 63
Main open data categories Cartography, Statistics, Environments, Financial data
Licenses CC-0 / CC-By
Additional information
In this section we provide some additional information to the current situation highlighted above.
The Information System Service of the City of Trento manages most of the databases used for internal applications, which have been designed to be functional for city structures themselves.
Through the Business Intelligence analysis tool “Business Object”, the Information System Service provides data extrapolation from internal application databases. Data from internal databases is furtherly used by the Statistics Office and the Office of Planning and Management Control (Ufficio Pianificazione e Controllo di Gestione) to produce their reports (eg. "Statistical Yearbook" and "Annual Report").
Although this process shows to be proficuos and useful, it has the drowback that the current organization relies on specific data knowledge held by the Structures of the City managing the databases by the technical point of view: in particular by the Information Systems Service, and by the Works of Primary Urbanization Service (this last for specific data such as traffic lights). This was shown by the census of internal processes of the Administration, which reported a strong dependency of the different Structures of the City on these two Services. Furthermore, the knowledge on databases is concentrated on a small number of civil servants from these two Services, which constitute a critical key point for the Administration from the data management point of view. The possibility of absence (sickness, retirement etc.) of one of these civil servants could imply loss of efficiency for the City.
The objective is therefore to restructure the internal operational processes so as to share the knowledge, to empower the data culture among the administrative structures, to move from the internal management to a shared information management.
The expected result from a better data management can become the instrument for enabling new services and new processes.
Additional information on Open Data:
Currently, the publication of dataset as open data is an ad-hoc and manual process that is difficult to handle and does not guarantee an automatic update of exposed data.
A virtuous exception is represented by map datasets, exposed as a service via links updated directly by the cartographic systems, with no need of manual operations.
A solution to the general manual process is under consideration and prototypization with the project ComunWEB of the Consortium of Municipalities of Trentino to which the City of Trento is contributing. Through this approach the automatic update of the data content can be guaranteed at least for the structured information published on the website of the Municipality of Trento, relying on the open-source Content Managent System (CMS) eZ-Publish. Indeed all the information published on the Web site are already structured and
updated directly and continuously in two ways: by a group of editors (for data not present in the internal databases, such as events or points of interest) or via webservices that retrieve data from internal databases (this is the case of data of the internal structures and official records produced by the City: determinations, decisions, etc....). The system ComunWEB provides a system API to expose data as a service via RESTful, where all structured information and released as Open Data, are automatically publicly available in JSON format. As soon as this system will be put in place, information of interest posted on the Web site (events, determinations, offices, ...), will be automatically available as Open Data exposing the link to the JSON file produced automatically by the system and updated in real time.
Furthermore, in collaboration with Open and Big Data Trentino project an automatic harvester will be able to automatically feed also the official Trentino Open Data catalog (dati.trentino.it) with open data published on the website of the city of Trento. This congiunction enables the connection with a wider “data network” composed by all the data published by different entities of the territory.
Improvement goals
Trento plans to enhance its smart dimension, proposing the City as a catalyst of activities focused on citizens needs and as pilot laboratory for actions in technological and social innovation aiming the improvement of the service to its population. The strategy to reach this goal is to base the realization of services on the power of the data as the main enabling infrastructure.
The goal is to design and activate a flow of processes in which data are exploited since their creation, ensuring a high level of quality and trustworthiness. In order to allow an easier data integration with data and contents generated by other local entities and individuals operating in the same area, the process will be governed at both organizational and legal level, as well as in technology.
Such management of public data will involve greater simplification and better efficiency within the administration itself, while defining a systematical improvement in the generation and use of the data, in connection with the services that the City will choose to activate, reducing costs and promoting the sustainability of the process.
Therefore, the City of Trento will adopt an organizational and technological data infrastructure, enhanced and made functional by technologies for Data Integration and
Data Analytics (in particular for data streams), which will enable different types of services, designed flexibly and incrementally according to a triple objective:
i. improve the quality of data processing inside the municipality itself so that the data is more easily accessible and usable for the pursuit of institutional public tasks of the different structures;
ii. to provide citizens with services based on municipal and territorial data that will improve the quality of life and facilitate the access to the information;
iii. provide high quality and ease reusable data to citizens and companies.
Connections with other areas
This section represents the core part of the new smart city action of the City of Trento. It allows the City to grow and enrich systematically the quantity and quality of services offered on all other areas of action identified by the vertical strategy Trento Smart City.
Project idea
Project " Trento City Dashboard "
The project is implemented within the framework of the collaboration between the City of Trento and TrentoRISE.
The goal is to define and implement a system, called Dashboard, allowing citizens to have a real feedback on the improvement and integration of municipal services. This instrument exploits the potential of management and improvement of data quality developed in the field of Open and Big Data, enabling their re-use.
The dashboard becomes the principal access point to the services of the municipal administration for the different parties involved, with specific ways of interaction and views:
i. Internal for officials ii. External for citizens
iii. Increasingly integrated with systems and services by the various public institutions of the territorial system, and first with the open data catalog of Trentino
Figure 1 - Overall Dashboard Data Service exposure architecture
The ambition of the project is to build a system infrastructure able to unify the different layers, such as:
i. internal to the municipality,
ii. integrable with other external sources and infrastructures, w.r.t. Trento municipality, iii. a system able to integrate and over the time provide the support to other even
internal infrastructures.
From the organizational point of view the dashboard introduces a new model, as an instrument which facilitates the construction of an open dialogue towards the community. Indeed it allows to identify more easily the data to be collected for services and for institutional communication addressed to citizens and other institutions.
Thus the project aims to create a technological and organizational infrastructure able to generate cleaned and reliable data, strategic and functional to the objectives of transparency, efficiency and innovation pursued by the City.
Therefore, it will focus primarily on a phase of definition of the back-end infrastructure, aimed to making systemic all the aspects (organizational, legal, and technological) of data integration within the administration. This phase gradually integrates the different existing services, as new services as well, and considers identified front-end needs, as defined by the city of Trento.
