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An Innovative, Open, Interoperable Citizen Engagement Cloud Platform for Smart Government and Users’ Interaction

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Abstract

This paper introduces an open, interoperable, and cloud-computing-based citizen engagement platform for the management of administrative processes of public administrations, which also increases the engagement of citizens. The citizen engagement platform is the outcome of a 3-year Italian national project called PRISMA (Interoperable cloud platforms for smart government; http://www.ponsmartcities-prisma.it/). The aim of the project is to constitute a new model of digital ecosystem that can support and enable new methods of interaction among public administrations, citizens, companies, and other stakeholders surrounding cities. The platform has been defined by the media as a flexible (enable the addition of any kind of application or service) and open (enable access to open services) Italian “cloud” that allows public administrations to access to a vast knowledge base represented as linked open data to be reused by a stakeholder community with the aim of developing new applications (“Cloud Apps”) tailored to the specific needs of citizens. The platform has been used by Catania and Syracuse municipalities, two of the main cities of southern Italy, located in the Sicilian region. The fully adoption of the platform is rapidly spreading around the whole region (local developers have already used available application programming interfaces (APIs) to create additional services for citizens and administrations) to such an extent that other provinces of Sicily and Italy in general expressed their interest for its usage. The platform is available online and, as mentioned above, is open source and provides APIs for full exploitation.

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Notes

  1. For reasons why smart cities need cloud services and the importance of computational power, have a read at http://www.ubmfuturecities.com/author.asp?section_id=234&doc_id=526607

  2. http://www.unfpa.or

  3. http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/internet-of-things-network-to-be-worth-3-trillion-by-2020-with-30-billion-connected-devices-says-idc-240972.html

  4. ITU has defined some standards related to the definition of a smart sustainable city, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/ssc/Pages/default.aspx

  5. https://hadoop.apache.org/

  6. http://spark.apache.org/

  7. ES Open Data City Census http://es-city.census.okfn.org/

  8. http://fixmystreet.org/

  9. http://www.improve-my-city.com/

  10. The link for such a call is http://www.ponrec.it/programma/interventi/smartcities/ (in Italian)

  11. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Nova

  12. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Swift

  13. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Glance

  14. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Keystone

  15. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Horizon

  16. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron

  17. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder

  18. The reader is invited to check http://www.catania-smartcity.it/il-progetto/prisma-smart-urban-framework-paas/ for a high-level description of each module.

  19. http://www.jbpm.org/

  20. http://dashbuilder.org

  21. http://www.openldap.org/

  22. http://phpldapadmin.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

  23. http://jasig.github.io/cas/4.1.x/index.html

  24. https://www.talend.com/resource/open-source-esb.html

  25. http://www.apache.org/

  26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP

  27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer

  28. http://spring.io/

  29. http://projects.spring.io/spring-security/

  30. http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html

  31. http://hibernate.org/

  32. https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/OpenLink_Virtuoso

  33. http://wit.istc.cnr.it/prisma/webcontent/sparql.php

  34. http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/

  35. http://www.citysdk.eu/

  36. https://angularjs.org/

  37. http://getbootstrap.com/

  38. https://wordpress.org/

  39. http://www.opentripplanner.org/

  40. https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/

  41. http://www.opentripplanner.org/

  42. https://www.catania-smartcity.it/

  43. http://www.siracusa-smartcity.it/

  44. City reporter for the City of Catania https://www.catania-smartcity.it/cityreporter/; city reporter for the City of Syracuse https://www.siracusa-smartcity.it/cityreporter/

  45. TOUI for the City of Catania https://www.catania-smartcity.it/toui; TOUI for the City of Syracuse https://www.siracusa-smartcity.it/toui

  46. Smart city movers for Catania: https://www.catania-smartcity.it/citymover/; smart city movers for Syracuse: https://www.siracusa-smartcity.it/citymover/

  47. https://www.catania-smartcity.it/CityWelfare/.

  48. AgID “Guidelines for the rationalization of the digital infrastructure of the Italian Public Administration,” http://archivio.digitpa.gov.it/sites/default/files//Linee%20guida%20razionalizzazione%20CED%20PA.pdf (in Italian)

  49. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02003L0098-20130717&from=EN

  50. https://aw4city.wordpress.com/

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the PON R&C project PRISMA, “PlatfoRms Interoperable cloud for SMArt-Government,” ref. PON04a2 A Smart Cities, under the National Operational Programme for Research and Competitiveness 2007–2013. Moreover, this work has been supported by the AW4City2015 workshopFootnote 50 held in Florence, Italy, within the WWW 2015 conference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Research Council (CNR), Via Gaifami 18, 95126, Catania, Italy

    Diego Reforgiato Recupero, Sergio Consoli, Aldo Gangemi, Giorgia Lodi, Misael Mongiovì & Valentina Presutti

  2. Sielte, Via Cerza 4, 95027, San Gregorio di Catania, Italy

    Mario Castronovo, Salvatore Davide Rapisarda & Salvo Rosa

  3. Datanet, Syracuse, Contrada Targia 58, 96100, Syracuse, Italy

    Tarcisio Costanzo, Luigi Grasso & Gianluca Merendino

  4. Paris Nord University, Sorbonne Citè, CNRS UMR7030, France

    Aldo Gangemi

  5. Etna Hitech, Viale Africa 31, 95129, Catania, Italy

    Emanuele Spampinato

  6. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Diego Reforgiato Recupero

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  1. Diego Reforgiato Recupero
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  2. Mario Castronovo
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Correspondence to Diego Reforgiato Recupero.

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Reforgiato Recupero, D., Castronovo, M., Consoli, S. et al. An Innovative, Open, Interoperable Citizen Engagement Cloud Platform for Smart Government and Users’ Interaction. J Knowl Econ 7, 388–412 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-016-0361-0

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