The vision of Ghent on Smart City, CoAP and DIY IoT

Jelle Mostrey:

In het Gentse bestuursakkoord 2013-2018 lezen we het volgende: ‘Smart City’ is een internationaal erkend concept, en kent daarom ook verschillende benaderingen. In Gent kiezen we voor een holistische benadering. Een belangrijk aandachtspunt is het evenwicht tussen een technologische en niet-technologische aanpak. Een andere kernopdracht bestaat er in de Gentenaars te motiveren en in staat te stellen om zélf mee te bouwen aan de stad van de toekomst. Het Ghent Living Lab is een cruciale pijler in het uitbouwen van Gent als Smart City. Door het Smart City-concept te vertalen naar een Gents model willen we bestaande en nieuwe netwerken koppelen en zo een voorbeeld zijn in Europa van een leefbare, moderne en innovatieve stad.

We schetsen kort de algemene visie van de Stad Gent over ‘smart cities’. En na een beknopte voorstelling van het Ghent Living Lab, illustreren we via twee praktijkvoorbeelden, “ZWERM” en “GreenWeCan”, hoe de Stad Gent ook betrokken is bij IoT experimenten.

Walter Colitti:

"The fragmentation of communication technologies has been a major debate among the IoT community. The IoT has largely been dominated by proprietary and domain specific protocol stacks. This has been motivated by the need of performance optimization of severely constrained devices and by the vendor lock-in based market, which forces customers to be locked into a long term relationship.

It has widely been accepted that this problem can be solved by adopting IoT communication protocols based on Web technologies such as Representational State Transfer (REST) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). These open standard technologies enable interoperability and plug-and-play capabilities.

The aim of this presentation is to discuss on the benefits of adopting IoT protocols based on open standards and in particular on Web technologies. The presentation will focus the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), an IoT protocol being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). CoAP is a Web transfer protocol based on REST/HTTP and designed for constrained devices.

The presentation discusses on how the adoption of CoAP has a positive impact on the IoT from an interoperability and architectural perspective. It describes the main CoAP mechanisms and shows how the adoption of this protocol provides a means to achieve a tight integration of the IoT with the Web."

Marc Godon:

Did Our World Became DIYSEABLE (http://dyse.org:8080/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=hometest)?

The Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences project (DiYSE) aims at enabling ordinary people to easily create, setup and control applications in their smart living environments as well as in the public Internet-of-Things space, allowing them to leverage aware services and smart objects for obtaining highly personalized, social, interactive, flowing experiences at home and in the city. This ITEA2/IWT Research project started in 2009 and ended in 2011. The question we like to discuss in this talk is:

How far are we from achieving this noble objective? Do we need a revised action plan for the near future?

Reference. (https://itea3.org/project/result/download/5544/08005-DiY%20Smart%20Experiences-DIYSE_results_oct-12.pdf.pdf)