A Semantic Data Marketplace for Easy Data Sharing within a Smart City

Abstract

Today, smart city applications are largely based on data collected from different stakeholders. This presupposes that the required data sources are publicly available. While open data platforms already provide a number of urban data sources, enterprises and citizens have few opportunities to make their data available. To complicate things further, if the data is published, the processing of this data is already extremely time-consuming today, as the data sources are heterogeneous and the corresponding homogenization has to be carried out by the data consumers themselves. In this paper, we present a data marketplace that enables different stakeholders (public institutions, enterprises, citizens) to easily provide data that can especially contribute to the further realization of smart cities. This marketplace is based on the principles of semantic data management, i.e., data providers annotate their added data with semantic models. With the help of these models, the data sources can be found and understood by data consumers and finally homogenized in a way that is suitable for their application.