Smart Cities and Context brokers: the holistic view of the information

Smart Cities are the reflection of the digital transformation that we are currently experiencing. This concept seeks to increase the quality of life of people through the use of different technologies such as IoT Platforms.

The collection of data from different city services helps citizens and administrations to make informed decisions, achieving more efficient use and management in different areas such as:

  • Atmosphere
  • Waste management
  • Water treatment
  • Transport and traffic
  • Energy
  • Tourism

But collecting and analyzing data could be a mess as a result of the ever-increasing volume of data, data sources and data types. We need something to create a holistic view of the information that comes from multiple systems and serve it to third parties such as citizens, service providers or even other public administrations. This is the motivation to implement a context broker in IoT platform architecture.

A context broker is a digital platform component that brings data together with the appropriate context, making the data easier to interpret. It provides the layer that describes each type of data according to standard specifications such as the one implemented by the FIWARE platform that was promoted by the European Union as a platform for global application deployment and on which different standards such as FIRMWARE NGSI have been developed.

You can find more information about Context Broker here.