CitySDK (Smart City Service Development Kit and its applications) Project, the big adventure on open data, had started together with 23 project partners from 8 different EU countries in 2012 and after very successful two years, the final meeting of the Project realized in Helsinki on June 10-11, 2014. This is only the last meeting of the Project, the works on CitySDK and open data will continue by all of the enthusiast partners.
CitySDK Project is a 6.8 million CIP ICT PSP Project part-funded by the European Commission and it comprises 23 partners from 8 different EU and associated countries where TAGES and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality are the Turkish partners. The Project started in 2012 and the city authorities, innovation agencies and technology enabler partners worked together and did a great job during 2 years.
The aim of the Project was to develop a toolkit for developers and cities to build new services together. In this respect, the partners worked on three main areas: smart participation, smart mobility and smart tourism. The participating cities (Helsinki, Amsterdam, Manchester, Barcelona, Rome, Lisbon, Lamia and Istanbul) released their open data in these domains and 3 open source APIs and some developer tools have been developed. The partners also organized some events such as hackathons, innovation challenges, coding days, etc. and engage the developer community to the Project so that they could try and test the APIs to make development more reliable. The APIs of each city are available at the following link: http://www.citysdk.eu/developers/
As a result of the Project, the CitySDK Toolkit has been developed successfully. The toolkit comprises of: documented open source APIs, open datasets from 8 European cities, sample applications and visualisations that utilise the APIs, developer and city support, a discovery service. And the components include open 311 API, linked data API, tourism API and developer tools (discovery service, github, etc).
The main challenges of the Project were releasing the open data because of some national regulations and engagement of the citizens and developers to the project. However, each partner overcame these challenges and achieved the aims of the Project. The final meeting of the Project was held in Helsinki on June 10-11, 2014 and hosted by the Finnish partner, Forum Virium Helsinki. However, it is not the end of the cooperation. During the meeting, the partners discussed about the roadmap for the sustainability of the CitySDK and also possible new open data projects.
If you want to build services by using CitySDK and learn more about the project, please contact us: info@tages.biz.
Aslihan Kagnici, August 08, 2014