LocalFocus: A Big Data Service Platform for Local Communities and Smarter Cities

Big data are a key enabler for smart cities and local communities willing to offer more tailored services and resources to citizens. One of the biggest challenges in a long-running big data platform for smarter cities lies in the real capacity not only to drill into the data, but also, and most importantly, to leverage existing social and geographical ties between all main actors of local communities, which range from normal citizens and people to economy stakeholders, non-profit and social organizations, and government and administrative staff. The platform should let them use (and disclose) among themselves those pieces of information they do not want to publish globally (e.g., on Facebook and Google), but would be willing to share and interweave locally (e.g., through an easy-to-use community portal). In addition, if the advent of Web 2.0 technologies simplified both the consumption and the production of new contents (e.g., through highly interactive wiki-like pages), they considerably enable additive services. A notable example is the metering of the digital footprint and traces left by users as they interact with these platforms, useful to further enhance the user experience by providing automatically adapted mashups of local community services/data. We describe how to exploit these socio-technical aspects by integrating them in a new semantic-enabled big data platform specifically designed for the local community smart city scenario called LocalFocus. The article also reports some experimental results collected with a first in-the-field deployment of the LocalFocus in Imola, namely, the ImolaInRete community portal, which has already involved more than 800 citizens since its launch in January 2017.