Towards Provisioning of Real-time Smart City Services Using Clouds

ICT is becoming an enabler for smart city applications by making effective use of various data resources generated daily in an urban environment. Mostly this data is utilised by city authorities for city planning purposes and often citizens become indirect beneficiaries of such applications. In this paper we present an algorithm for real-time processing of streaming data from multiple sources. We also present the design and proof of concept of an application that performs mining and analysis of open data available through city portals and social networks and generates an information service in real time for use by city administrations. The prototype utilises streaming data from Twitter and open data from Bristol to demonstrate a hypothetical scenario using Apache Storm. The output is presented in the form of visual maps using OpenStreetMaps as a backend and the prototype highlights various challenges which are discussed in detail.