Abstract: 

Smart cities gather massive amounts of data from Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors all over the city and external data sources provides by city services. These data sets are often made available to the public as open data sets containing varying data about the city which can be freely consulted. However, while the data is publicly available, using the data for practical use cases still requires infrastructure and knowledge on many big data environments. This leads to a lot of wasted potential where data is never actually used.

City of Things is a smart city project in the city of Antwerp (Belgium) which provides people with access to open data as well as a sandbox environment in which they can run their own analyses. Empowered by the Tengu platform, anyone can create custom big data frameworks through automated installation, configuration and integration of big data technologies for storage and analysis. This allows the City of Things to go beyond open data and offer citizens and stakeholders access to stakeholders.

This workshop/talk will go through the architecture of the City of Things platform and show how an open information platform can be built. It aims to eliminate the issue of open dead data in a smart city environment. Additionally, the workshop/talk will show how a workspace in the experimental sandbox environment can be set up with the Tengu platform for different real-life use cases and how users, citizens or stakeholders can acquire access to data and information.

Bio: 

Thomas Vanhove obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Ghent University, Belgium, in January 2018. He researched dynamic storage solutions and polyglot persistence as a means to reach a better performance for applications. In 2016 he also founded Tengu, a spin-off company of Ghent University and imec, together with Gregory Van Seghbroeck. The company offers a platform that automates the setup of big data workspaces for data scientists.