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While the transparency agenda has led to a global movement around open data, between 2014 and 2020 only about 3% of the world's data has been opened up. This is mostly because it was efficiency-driven and technology-led, so only large cities – over 1 million inhabitants - have generally benefited. Current developments show that from merely making services and data available online, governments and local administrations are now moving towards a collaborative model of data sharing. This new paradigm could create value for those 85% of European cities that have not reaped the benefits of the promises of open data.
In order to create the enabling legal environment, the EU Data Strategy aims to make the EU a leader in a data-driven society by creating a single market for data. It proposes the construction of an EU data framework that would support the sharing of data for innovators. The Data Governance Act puts forward a common governance layer for the European data spaces, while the Data Act (foreseen for Q3 2021) will address business to government (B2G) data sharing. Finally, the implementing regulation of the Open Data Directive will define a number of High Value Datasets, which will have to be made available free of charge and through application programme interfaces.
Allowing cities and communities access to more relevant data needed for their city management and policy-making and creating privacy-preserving data marketplaces will however, also require specific mechanisms for data sharing. This is what the data space for climate-neutral and smart communities should create; an interoperable, trusted and secure environment, where currently fragmented and dispersed data can be shared among those, who become part of this data space, based upon voluntary agreements and under certain conditions (e.g. access rights, reusability rights, licenses, price tags, etc.). There are a number of possible ways through which cities are already tapping into data held by the private sector, for example through data donorship, public procurement of data, data sharing pools, or even tender clauses. The forthcoming data space should however, help scale up these solutions through a multi-stakeholder governance scheme and appropriate technical architecture. It will also support addressing cross-city challenges e.g. detecting floods or mitigating climate events.
Members of the dataspace will jointly agree on the core data themes (with relevance for the Green Deal objectives) to be accessed, shared, used and re-used across EU cities and communities, following similar conditions. The dataspace should be demand-led; both addressing the cities’ concrete needs as well as ensuring a citizen-orientated service design. From the cities’ point of view, accessing private sector data with public interest is key, so perhaps they may benefit from preferential conditions for accessing and reusing such data.
In terms of core datasets or data themes, location information (GIS, INSPIRE), data from utilities (e.g. waste, water, energy consumption) as well as environmental data (e.g. air quality, weather, etc.) were mentioned as highly important. Depending on the business case and cities’ needs, population/census data and as well as data from mobile phone operators and 5G networks are also important as these can give a near real-time representation of traffic, daytime population distribution and commuting flows. In a smart city context, the combination of these data would allow for integrated (cross-domain) urban services, which requires interoperability, modularity, common data models, APIs as well as trust.
In order to ensure interoperability, the Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) endorsed by the Living-in.eu declaration and community, provide Common Data Models (based on existing models like SAREF, DATEX II, GSMA, schema.org) and (iii) a Marketplace (based on TM Forum, Business API and the Fiware business EcoSystem) to enable access to those data models. They also facilitate Context Information Management, Personal Data Management, and the procurement of Fair AI MIM; the latter two being work in progress. Just like the MIMs, the CEF Digital Service Infrastructure building blocks - such as the Context Broker, the Big Data Test Infrastructure, eID, eDelivery and eSignature - are a set of standards and technical specifications and address common generic digital capabilities that cover the basic needs of any Digital Service Platform. Therefore, cities should not start from scratch, but can start by using existing tools and build on them and therefore be interoperable from the start. The work on a European Interoperability Framework for Smart Cities and Communities (EIF4SCC) is also crucial for the creation of a data space for smart communities. The ambition of this project is to facilitate a wider adoption of smart cities and technologies and the development of new services by ensuring interoperability across domains, cities, regions and borders. This project will provide a common approach towards the definition of interoperability for smart cities and communities and ensure an aligned mind-set concerning its aspects.
Governance of the dataspace and with that the entire local data ecosystem, will also be key. A recent study highlighted the role of local authorities in the orchestration of the ecosystem, the importance of stkeholders’ engagement, which is key to define and integrate the relevant stakeholders and then to distribute the value within the ecosystem between the actors, data-related issues and an approach to economic sustainability:
The managing of all data relevant for cities could be an issue, especially since projections indicate that the explosion of data will be multiplied by five in the five coming years due to connected devices, putting pressure on where and how to store and process our data in Europe. The tendency also shows a move from mostly central cloud infrastructure towards the edge of the network, i.e. near the end-users, including cities. This shift together with increasing expectations of end-users for secure infrastructure with low energy consumption and real time processing, cities may be interested in using the cloud infrastructure. This could result in 50% efficiency gain of their IT budget, enable real-time data processing services and ensure a secure way to host data at local level, or in a federated manner with other cities.
Parallel to the development of a smart communities’ dataspace, several other sectoral data spaces are in the making, each with their own specificities. The mobility data space aims to increase availability of essential data to support passenger and freight transport, facilitate cross-sector data sharing and reuse for multi-modality, help data reuse and improve data findability. The health data space will include (very) sensitive data, trusted health datasets, extremely sensitive genomics data and cancer images. In order to ensure interoperability, common technical specifications, trust frameworks and a cyber-security framework are being developed, along with a legislative proposal on a European health data space during the course of 2021.
The data space for climate-neutral and smart communities will also be important for Urban Digital Twins. Several EU projects are piloting the concept (DUET, LEAD, DigiTranScope, URBANAGE, etc.), while Eindhoven, Newcastle, Rennes, Luxembourg and the UK also putting in place twins focusing on their specific needs. For Urban Digital Twins issues around legal security around data sharing, data ownerships, data roles and responsibilities, data availability and quality as well as privacy aspects are highly important. On the other hand, the technical provisions, organisational approaches, lessons learned and community around the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive (spatial information for environmental policy monitoring) could be helpful.
As part of the Living-in.eu movement, the community identified a number of iconic projects; digital solutions for several societal challenges with multiple technologies. As a start, focus will be on urban digital twins (e.g. for urban planning or predictive maintenance), citizen card and urban air mobility, while others may follow in future. Cities and communities are therefore, invited to join the movement, to start working together on the shared vision and the conditions that enable it.
For more detailed information, please see the full report attached.