Open Source Informatics for Smart Cities

Dave Greenop adds to my previous item ....

Following our chain of thoughts from the Leeds seminar on Civic Society we started to wonder how the many different types of information and control systems would be implemented and managed in a true Smart City.
The reality is that these systems are mostly supplied to local authorities by specialised companies, for example traffic control systems. For there to be good integration of these systems it is not just the communication aspects that have to be considered but also the interfaces between systems. We guess that these interfaces are API’s (Application programming Interfaces) that would allow the integration of diverse hardware or dedicated system software into a smart city management system. Of course we have no idea whether manufactures of traffic lights, for example, already provide this, if they do then it is likely to be proprietary i.e. you will be limited to what can be done.
If you start to analyse were information technology can be beneficial in managing a modern city then you may come up with very wide and diverse applications, many of which will require the networking of hardware such as sensors etc. All of these systems would require software to drive them and this could be a rich area for the developers of open source software. Along similar lines we can envisage the possibility of open source informatics for providing the overall system design for smart cities, in this way many different local councils and commercial companies could collaborate to provide cost effective solutions in both software and hardware.
It’s interesting that many of the new devices appearing in our home, for example routers, set-top boxes and home automation systems are fairly standard hardware devices controlled by embedded Linux. Could not the same be true of smart city systems.