A Semantic Data Model for Smart Cities
Semantic Information Model
Smart Cities
Semantic Queries
Ontologies
Linked Data
Smart cities involve a myriad of interconnected systems designed to promote better management of urban and natural resources in cities, thus contributing to improving citizens' quality of life. The heterogeneity of domains, systems, data, and relationships between them requires defining a data model that can express information in a flexible and extensible way, and promote interoperability between systems and applications. In addition, smart city systems can benefit from georeferenced information to enable more effective actions in a real-world urban space. In order to address the challenges related to data heterogeneity, considering georeferenced territory information, this paper presents LGeoSIM, a semantic information model for smart cities as a means of promoting interoperability and enabling automated information thinking. LGeoSIM is based on Semantic Web technologies, especially ontologies, RDF and Linked Data, which enable the definition of linked semantic information, and queries about such information. Its specification was implemented, supported by the NGSI-LD specification, on the Smart Geo Layers Platform (Sgeol), a FIWARE-designed middleware platform that aims to facilitate the integration of data provided by heterogeneous sources into a smart city environment, as well as how to support application development.