In all activities for the development of a smart future society, information is a critical commodity.
All parties involved in the community building process need different types of information to use in planning, construction and maintenance of the smart city, whether it is geographical information, environmental information or information about existing buildings, transport infrastructure or other supply systems. Most of the geo-located information comes with tabular attribute information which is of great importance for analysis.
To enable different parties in the process to communicate effectively and make well-considered decisions, everyone must have access to the same information. It is also of importance that all information is reliable and comes from authoritative and trustworthy sources.
Information in the form of digital data is collected and stored by many organisations for different purposes, but which information is available is not always known to all parties that might need it. To create awareness and to enable the handling of such underlying information optimally, it is necessary to have appropriate infrastructure for information management and exchange of data. This infrastructure includes agreements on what data should be available as well as a licensing and business model for data exchange. A technical infrastructure, or common access point, is also needed for making data easily accessible.
Usually, public organisations are responsible for such a data exchange model. Many of the included data types are also produced and held by public agencies, but data from commercial companies can also be included.
