Description
Future internet trends and motivations have a catalytic effect on smart city’s interoperability, offering new opportunities for open web services through linked and open data. Ontologies and semantic web services provide an important inter-operable data representation standard. Languages like W3C, RDF-S and OWL enable the exchange of data across city’s domains by collecting intra-domain concepts and defining relationships among them. Visualization APIs (Visualizations API, MIT Simile Exhibit API, pipes API, protovis API) expose data on the web on a common visualization structure. At the same time, the trust and safety of the internet shortcoming is attempted to be alleviated through the emerging research area of Internet of Trust. Another aspect of the open integration layer is the storing and accessing of applications and computer data often through a Web browser in cloud computing. Europe’s Future Internet and Digital agenda recently highlighted the importance of Smart Cities and their cross-cutting issues in the information era. Their dense, urban environments are well known for the vast amounts of produced and exchanged. Viewed from a slightly different perspective, these social ecosystems are shaped under the rising requirement of people to communicate, get connected with each other and most important to have appropriate and timely access to information regardless of their or of the information’s location. These facts explain why smart cities make such ideal candidates when it comes to the evaluation and the evolution of the next wave of internet technologies and services. Any successful attempts to deliver them will deliver real value back to the citizens and in a sense cater for their informational and other needs. This will translate among others into social benefits, sustainable economic development, improved quality of life and undoubtedly competitive advantages for the cities that achieve that, (e.g. Seoul). The component of Linked semantic Web Services involves publishing semantic annotations of services based on a direct application of linked data principles. A possible approach, in order to achieve the above scope, is the use of iServe which supports publishing service annotations as linked data. In particular iServe: •Supports importing service annotations in a range of formalisms (e.g., SAWSDL, WSMO-Lite, MicroWSMO) that cover both WSDL services and Web APIs; Provides means for publishing semantic annotations of services which are automatically assigned a resolvable HTTP URI; •Includes support for content negotiation so that service annotations can be returned in plain HTML or in RDF for direct machine consumption; •Provides a SPARQL endpoint allowing advanced querying over the services annotations; •Offers a read/write REST API so that services can easily be retrieved and published from remote applications; and •Automatically generates links between the published service annotations and additional documents on the Web such as the original service description or documentation so that users and machines can easily discover more information.
Nikos Zaharis
