Spero

THE CHALLENGE

Spero aspires to make the “Smart City” concept come into fruition by bringing together the population, technology, and decision makers in an interconnected way. Awareness of the problems is the first step to solving them, but Spero.City goes further and gives authorities information on how to solve them in an optimised way, effectively making the city a truly smart one.

THE SOLUTION

Spero.City is based on the paradigms of the IoE, cloud computing, collaborative systems, social power and empowerment, paradigms that mark a shift to a new era of opportunity for consumers, businesses and governments. Its basic functionality allows citizens and company clients or employees, who, by means of a mobile device, are in touch with the urban facilities/networks on a daily basis to report georeferenced occurrences (anomalies, problems) that require repairs or intervention. The system is conceived to interact with social networks and, through them, allow reports to be followed, commented and cross-checked (data will be used within an innovative approach for decision support analysis taking into consideration social aspects).

Spero.City includes a professional back-office that receives, organizes and analyses the incoming occurrences with scientific decision support tools. The tools inspect the relevance of the occurrences and rank/classify them, emitting at request automatic alerts for urgent cases and periodic reports. All this helps in designing optimised intervention plans, taking into consideration economic, social, environmental and technical aspects. Incorporation of these tools is one of the more innovative aspects of Spero.City and adds to its value proposition. The system architecture is very flexible and continuously adapts to the specificities of each city or organization. FIWARE usage permits virtually unlimited scalability of Spero.City and its application at a global scale.

WHY FIWARE

FIWARE technology is a cornerstone of Spero.City because it allows scalability. Larger volumes of data are expected as Spero.City continuous to go global (500k reports/day by 2020, even more considering IoT connection), and the ability to handle that data quickly and reliably will therefore be crucial. FIWARE is used to store, categorize, and cross-check data, and to run algorithmic calculations over it, with rank/classification of occurrences and real-time alerting as output.

The keyword of FIWARE use in Spero is “We make things BIG.” For this purpose the following Generic Enablers are used:

• Big Data GE (Cosmos): Cosmos is the right tool for parallel distribution of data processing (categorization, algorithms), whose results are used to generate alerts and reports.
• Complex Event Processing GE (ProTon): CEP avoids implementation of a full real-time alerting system.
• Object Storage GE: For storage of large volumes of binary data (photos, docs).
• POI Data Provider: For storage of georeferenced data.
• Context Broker GE (Orion): The FIWARE integrated broker service is the natural piece of the puzzle to bring all the other services together, as it handles large volumes of incoming data and quickly ships them to other modules.

Spero also uses GE Filab instances:

• Identity Manager GE (KeyRock): Ready-made login fallback for the general public.
• CKAN: Widely used and standardized open data broadcast instance. Spero will be generating and broadcasting this sort of data.
• Wirecloud: Simple user-friendly mashup creation. Client-side customizable automated reports.