each new capability should be able to simply acquire and add it to the existing infrastructure with a minimum of tailoring and reworking of existing component interfaces. The whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Convening a public working group to achieve consensus on a smart city framework meets a number of needs. Cities and entrepreneurs worldwide seek to enable incrementally added “smarts” to various aspects of city life regardless of which community of interest the components come from. And they do not want to wait to deploy these capabilities in anticipation of the arrival of some grand scheme. A desirable architecture would draw on the existing work to minimize the barriers to integrating critical as well as new and novel applications to the benefit of citizens and city managers.
The recent progress of applications in smart cities has been explosive. In just one example, this is evidenced by the large engagement achieved last year in NIST’s Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC)[1]. There are many teams of implementers and cities pioneering applications all over the globe. There are also many consortia and standards organizations developing architectures of various scopes appropriate for Smart City integrations. All of these groups would benefit from the ability to work together through a common language and shared architectural principles.
As well as industry interest, governments have a keen desire to benefit from the efficient integration of “smart” into their cities. A recent report[2] predicts that by 2017, twenty of the world’s largest countries will have in place prioritized national smart city policies and one third of medium and large cities worldwide will have developed a smart city roadmap. In the U.S., the Office of Science and Technology Policy recently announced a “Smart Cities Initiative to Tackle City Challenges with Innovative Approaches”[3]. A shared smart cities framework can support informed policy and decision-making and promote the emergence of a vibrant global market for smart city technologies.
To meet the needs of all stakeholders, the public working group will be a technology-and business-model-neutral forum for capturing a minimum set of commonality that can be adopted to achieve the composable vision of a smart city. The goal is to find a common intersection of consensus among the stakeholders around which all participants can rally. To achieve this goal, the working group will:
- Be free and open for participation by anyone, anywhere in the world upon no-cost registration at the group web site;
- Comprise technical experts and city stakeholders from industry, academia, and government worldwide;
- Make its deliverables freely available on the web;
