As they transform, Smart Cities will benefit from the inclusion of different forms of classification right from the definition of strategic plans to the implementation and in-life administration and management of systems and services. It is more than likely that cities today already use classification methods and as such there will be varying degrees of maturity of their management and usage. To highlight the importance of Smart City Classification in the management of the city and subsequent use and support for cyber security i will outline a new breed of Smart City application systems – The Integrated Operations Centre.
Nokia have developed an Integrated Operations Center for Smart Cities, to quote from their website:
Nokia’s Integrated Operations Center (IOC) lies at the heart of Smart City operations offering a unified real-time view into all Smart city assets and services, bringing efficiency and revenue opportunities with analytics integration, while facilitating rapid response based on automated workflows across multiple applications.
| Rapid onboarding of multivendor legacy and new applications, platforms, analytics engines and systems |
| Provides consolidated view across an entire city, with data feeds and alerts from various smart city devices, systems and applications |
| Enhanced cooperation between different agencies working within the smart city environment |
| Flexible deployment options on-premise or on the Cloud |
There are several classification tools such as controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, topic maps, logical models and ontologies. Each with their role and advancement of knowledge, structure and relationships. In particular, there are ontologies which are frameworks for representing shareable and reusable knowledge about a particular domain. Their ability to define classes, describe relationships and their interconnections make them very useful for modeling specific, linked and coherent data sets.
The domains within a Smart City – as defined by taxonomies – will benefit from a deeper understanding and qualification of the assets, systems and other entities that make up that specific domain that ontologies can provide. From this will evolve further patterns of usage, integration, performance and monitoring helping the city to understand the particulars in more detail. This in turn will make the role of cyber security easier in detecting events and anomalies. I plan to explore this further by looking at the development of smart city projects and their use of Smart City Taxonomies, Smart City Vocabulary and Smart City Ontology.
Smart City Cyber Security 