To advance digital transformation on the local and regional levels, many EU, nationally, regionally or locally funded smart communities projects are already running or now emerging in the European Union.
To promote win-win cooperation, cluster meetings are organised between relevant smart communities projects, key networks (e.g. Living-in.eu, OASC) and the European Commission.
On 5 June 2023 the second such meeting took place in a hybrid format in Brussels. The event was an opportunity for projects and initiatives to look for synergies and cooperation to further advance on the road to data sharing and data services to build the smart cities and communities of the future. The Commission invited 18 projects, among them COMPAIR.
At the meeting we set out our position on three questions that were used as a basis for discussion.
What are the different modalities in practice of possibly making the Living-in.eu platform the information and communication hub?
Living-in.eu would benefit from a repository of case studies on Local Green Deal implementation. COMPAIR would be happy to share success stories based on the experience of its pilots in using citizen science to build more resilient, livable communities in Athens, Berlin, Flanders, Plovdiv and Sofia. Ideally, case studies published on Living-in.eu would clearly demonstrate pathways to impact i.e. how it was achieved. In COMPAIR, this is done by linking citizen science to concrete policy measures and proposals e.g. school street (Flanders), new mobility plan (Berlin), STEM education (Plovdiv). By making citizen science data relevant to end users in policy we aim to a) help public authorities tap into the greatest resource cities have at their disposal - their citizens - and b) motivate people to get involved in democratic life by showing that their efforts can inform policy choices that, in turn, directly affect them, their children and the environment.
Update on collective EU efforts on interoperability and standardisation, with a focus on MIMs+.
The activities within COMPAIR fit well within the OASC MIM interoperability concept. Standardised open metadata, API standards, data models, and context information are needed to professionalise citizen science data for use within government processes. COMPAIR links up with MIM1 (context information), MIM2 (Shared data models) and MIM7 (Geospatial information management). COMPAIR starts from the OGC SensorThings API, where a further translation towards linked data concepts and NGSI-LD will be sought in the context of the European Dataspaces, among other things.
Sharing of data and data sets to build up the Data Space for Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities. How is your project sharing data, which data sets it is using? What are the main lessons from sharing data?
We are using the OGC sensorthings API throughout the project and will make our data available in that API as well. For instance this query (https://sensorthings.wecompair.eu/FROST-Server/v1.1/ObservedProperties$filter=name%20eq%20%27bcngm3%27&$expand=Datastreams($expand=Observations($top=5)) returns some data from our platform and can be used by any system that understands this standard. We make the data available to be downloaded from our dashboards, in csv format and in the future also as pdf reports. We facilitate incorporating our dashboards as iframes in existing webs and/or other dashboards.
More broadly, COMPAIR contributes to existing Citizen Science datasets such as sensor.community, Telraam (traffic counts) and is involved in the professionalisation of the Telraam API, among others. In addition, COMPAIR contributes to new sensor developments, such as a low-cost Black Carbon sensor, including advising on the API development. These datasets can be part of the dataspace for smart and sustainable cities and communities. The manner in which the various APIs and underlying datasets are accessed via the dataspaces, integrated or not, can be further discussed with the COMPAIR consortium by the dataspace managers.