The Discovery of Relevant Data-Sources in a Smart City Environment

Among all the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the Smart City concept has received significant attention in the last few years. The main motivation behind this interest is attributable to population growth and urbanization trend. Cities need, indeed, to be ready to face new challenges - e.g., traffic congestion, wast management, etc. - caused by this new amount of citizens. To address those issues, many IoT solutions have already been proposed and many others are still under investigation; anyway, those initiatives are all based on different standards and protocols, while the Smart City concept requires integration among all the stakeholders. In this paper, we present the VITAL architecture, which aims to integrate Internet- Connected Objects (ICOs) among multiple IoT platforms and ecosystems. In particular, we introduce the "ICOs and Services Discovery" module, which makes completely transparent, for users, the exploration of data-sources that are appropriate for his/her business context. This mechanism is at the basis of the Cloud of Things paradigm and a key feature as the platform agnostic property is an essential goal for VITAL.