| Abstract |
Cities have entered the age of the sensor and located sensors everywhere over and under cities. The sensors monitor a host of factors that assess City operations and life such as air quality, noise, city services and traffic. Further, the sensors have "gone mobile" with announcements of situation aware mobile sensor platforms designed for city-level security and public safety. These wearable sensor platforms combine video, audio, and location data with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities. However, the many sensors and functional platforms have not yet made the cities employing these many diverse sensors truly Smart. We are analyzing why the success toward the Smart city is limited, or late in coming. The explanations for the constrained effectiveness are assigned to many factors, but one of significance can be teased from a long-accepted explanation that associates data, information, and knowledge. Smart Cities need to effectively use the sensor data and the information assembled from these interpreted and organized data to create knowledge that serves the city and its people by answering and resolving key problems and questions. But the systems and analytic models needed to associate these data from many sensors have yet to be designed, constructed, and proven in the complex cities of today. Thus, the data (and information from the diverse sensors) lacks crucial integration and coordination for decisions and sense-making. While these sensor-based systems were, and in many cases are meeting some intended functionally discrete goals, they appear to be better described as data collection tools feeding centralized analytical engines. They are point solutions with specialized or targeted sensors feeding specialized solutions. This is a significant limiting factor in a city's drive to improve the quality of life and the efficiency of the services a city provides to its stakeholders. In this paper we present current trends in Smart City development, emerging issues with data and complexity growth, and proposes a mean to leverage the advancing technologies to address the integration problem. |