towards a semantic city service ecosystem

Towards a Semantic

City Service Ecosystem

Irene Celino and Alessio Carenini

CEFRIEL – Politecnico di Milano via Fucini 2, 20133 Milano, Italy

{firstname.lastname}@cefriel.com

Riva del Garda, 19 October 2014

5th Workshop on Semantics for Smarter Cities @ ISWC 2014



Digital environment in which City Services live

Coordinated and independent Governance of the City Services

Different stakeholders

Legal and business rules

Coopetition (cooperation and competition)

Strong connection with a spatio-temporal context

Services related and insisting on a physical area

Service consumption dependent on the timing and possible co-

occurrences of events

How should such a CSE be shaped and organized?

How can semantics support the life-cycle of City Services?

Riva del Garda, 2014/10/19 © CEFRIEL 20142I. Celino, A. Carenini - Semantic City Service Ecosystem @ S4SC Workshop

City Services

City Services

From public bodies (e.g. social services)

From utilities and private sector (e.g. electricity, water, transport,

telecommunication)

From third sector (e.g. non-profit, mutual aid, cooperatives)

From citizens themselves (e.g. grandparents taking children to

school)

Service does NOT mean Web Service

A City Service does not necessarily have a digital counterpart

A City Service is not necessarily supplied via Web


Semantics for City Services

Semantics can support the governance of a CSE

Especially if machine-readable semantics!

Semantics can intervene and prove useful throughout the

entire City Service life-cycle

Description of City Services

Distinguishing characteristics of services

Publication of City Services

CSE governance process

Retrieval of City Services

Exploitation of services by citizens


Describing City Services (1)

Different models to describe services exist

“Good old” Semantic Web Service models (e.g. WSMO, OWL-S) &

some more recent efforts (e.g. MSM, Hydra)

Designed for Web-based services

GoodRelations & Schema.org

For services offered through the Web (e.g. e-commerce)

IPAS model (Italian Public Administration Service)

Specific to public bodies

…

Existing models differ for

scope and level of detail


M. Castelli, M. Comerio, M. Cremaschi, «Towards the Definition of Value-added Services for

Citizens: a New Model for the Description of Public Administration Services», IJMIT 4(1), 2013

Describing City Services (2)

What’s the best way to describe City Services?

Fit for purpose!

Specificity of cities

Spatio-temporal context: where and when a service is offered

Specificity of citizens

Citizen profile

Citizen context

In our SPAC3 project, we follow a bottom-up approach to

describe City Services offered by municipalities

Existing services of Milano and Bergamo

Different nature of service (informative online services,

transactional online services, at-the-counter services, etc.)

Different target citizens (individual vs. family, child vs. adult,

person vs. association)


Publishing City Services (1)

A CSE governance process is needed!

Who is responsible for publication?

Public bodies example: Milano Famiglie


http://www.milanofamiglie.it/

http://www.milanofamiglie.it/



Private bodies example: E015 with a coopetition approach


http://www.e015.expo2015.org/

http://www.e015.expo2015.org/



Mixed approach

Public bodies, for public services

Private and third sector, for private services

Potentially also citizens, for social/community services

Governance board, to manage CSE life-cycle (approve add, access,

update, removal of City Services)


http://www.spac3.eu/


Retrieving City Services

Service Retrieval != Web Service Discovery

Because a service is not necessarily a Web service

Because there is a human being looking for a service

Applications of City Service retrieval

Browsing & Searching

A citizen proactively looks for a City Service

Personalized recommendations

A matchmaking process retrieves relevant City Services and notifies

them to the interested citizens


Recommending City Services

Semantic matchmaking to find correspondences between

service description and citizen context

What’s in a citizen context?

Personal context: who you are, what your interests are

Social context: your family, your friends

Temporal context: what is on your calendar

Spatial context: proximity to home/office, vicinity to

events/appointments in your calendar

[ anSWERS recommender for personal/social context-based recommendation D. Dell'Aglio, I. Celino,

D. Cerizza: Anatomy of a Semantic Web-enabled Recommender System, 4th Intl. SMR2 Workshop, 2010 ]


Challenges for a CSE

Building a CSE

Involving all stakeholders

Agreements and coopetition

Coverage of City Services

Feeding a CSE

Governance process

Participants to the entire City Service life-cycle

Running a CSE

“Closing the loop” with citizens (e.g. if services are not online, how

can a CSE know if a citizen actually used a specific service?)


Thanks for your attention!

Any question?

Irene Celino – CEFRIEL, Politecnico di Milano

email: [email protected] – web: http://swa.cefriel.it

Slides at: http://bit.ly/sem-cse

Acknowledgment: this work was supported by the SPAC3 project http://www.spac3.eu/

co-funded by Regione Lombardia (POR-FESR 2007-2013)

I. Celino, A. Carenini – Towards a Semantic City Service Ecosystem

5th Workshop on Semantics for Smarter Cities @ ISWC 2014

mailto:[email protected]

http://swa.cefriel.it/

http://bit.ly/sem-cse


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