A centralized platform of open government data as support to applications in the smart cities context

Abstract

Purpose

The development of smart cities (SCs) is a costly process as it requires the implementation of physical infrastructure to meet the demand for data collection. On the other hand, there are open government data (OGD) that are open and free, and can be a first step from the current city evolution to SCs at a more affordable cost. However, these data are available in a decentralized way, in different formats and granularities. To date, the authors have not found any literature work that performs the centralization of OGDs on a single platform. The purpose of this paper is provide a centralized OGD platform.

Design/methodology/approach

This work investigates the state-of-the-art literature from the OGD, establishes the research question, design and develop the platform for OGD and accomplish the validation of the platform.

Findings

Through the validations of the platform, advantages were observed in relation to productivity gain for the development of solutions, in the SC context, using the proposed platform.

Research limitations/implications

The data have been collected in a manual way but for future works, the authors will use the web-crawler for the collection of data.

Practical implications

One town hall (Sorocaba) is interested in using the platform to analyze the data usage in the simple way and compare with the other nearby towns.

Originality/value

It is a recent work in literature using OGD, and there is no work that centralizes the information about several town halls to provide comparison between them and improve the decision-making.

Citation

Vieira, D.I. and Alvaro, A. (2018), "A centralized platform of open government data as support to applications in the smart cities context", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 2-28. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-05-2017-0045