In association with:
Smart Cities
sensory overload One of the major challenges of data collection in a city is duplication, where various government entities plant their own sensors that are all connected to the same city data layer, leading to duplication.
that’s a bigger challenge. There’s always the risk of what we call sensor pollution in a city as it attempts to become smart. If the various government entities start planting their own sensors, even if they are all connected to the same city data layer, there might be duplicates. Sensors today can collect multiple types of data at the same time. For example, the same sensor can probably collect traffic, environmental and security data at the same time. The smart way to do it is to have a policy around sensor standards and how they technically connect to the data layer of the city, to rationalise investments and prevent sensor pollution. If you think of any city as a stack, as an enterprise, really what happens is that you do sensing at the bottom, whether it’s wired or wireless. Then you do data aggregation and analytics in the middle, and then you open up the enablers, the key core enablers of a city, like the digital ID and signatures, the payment, the geo-spatial block chain and others. And then there’s the apps and the IOC – the Integrated
8 Smart Cities Report 2017
“Dubai is the first in the world probably to have issued a comprehensive Data Law that governs data sharing and opening, managed by a dedicated data governing body named the Dubai Data Establishment. The UK doesn’t even have that level of legislation”
Operations Command and Control Centre. Really, this is the brain that takes all the data, analyses it and then makes the decisions – whether it’s decisions for urban planning or to manage the day-to-day. Or if it’s to actually give insights into feedback as to what’s supposed to happen in the future. So I see that as a very important layer. Cities need to pay great attention to make out where the investments are made within a city. How can NXN help cities and government authorities cope with the challenges of large volumes of data?
When you become smarter, when you have a sensing layer in the city and we have everything connected, then you have huge amounts of data generated every second. We see this as an opportunity. Without a unified smart platform acting as the central nervous system for the city, then you’ll have, first of all, a waste of very precious data that could have been gathered and analysed. But you’ll also have a technical challenge in terms of the systems being jammed and
not being able to work efficiently. The right way to do it is to have a big data, smart layer platform. What we at NXN did was work with the city of Dubai and identify the challenges it faced. We then conceptualised for Dubai the idea of having its own smart city platform. At the same time, we realised that as a company we were also advocating that cities need to have a smart city as a service model. That means a provider like NXN should step up, build this thing and offer it as a service over the cloud or on premises, depending on the city’s requirements. So, now we’ve built this platform and it’s operational in three cities – Dubai, Riyadh and Kuwait City. The way we’ve approached it is that we don’t sell it as a platform, but we sell it as a smart city service. For instance, you can have energy and facility management as a service, smart parking as a service, smart traffic intelligence as a service, smart safety and security as a service, and so on. What we do with that is give options to cities to click and choose.