CityWeb

This page is where the CitySDK chapter of the GCTC Transportation Supercluster Report will be written.

City SDK - Supporting Smart City Application Development

ABSTRACT Brief summary describing the need for substantially better software development tools, libraries, and common APIs to enable more efficient (faster, cheaper, interoperable, reusable) to create, develop, deploy, and maintain Smart City Applications. This need transcends the individual vertical fields (transit, wellness, safety, etc.) and should constitute part of the infrastructure backbone of Global Cities Team Challenge across Superclusters.

Introduction

• High level overview of need, why we need improved software development tooling
• Overview of current state (trends)
  • Proprietary development & deployment pillars
  • Lack of interoperability
  • Lack of consistent support for common APIs
  • Lack of portable vendor agnostic tools
  • Difficulty in enabling code reuse
  • No best practices nor community of SMEs dealing with Smart City App development
• Overview of authors of this content
• Outline the rest of the chapter

Scope and Definitions

• Definition of a SDK for Smart City Applications
• Scope of problem
  • Cover app development for both the IoT and web application levels
  • High level diagram of a proposed toolkit
• The importance of adopting common APIs
• Open source projects and communities

CitySDK Proposal

Provide a high-level overview of a proposed CitySDK project and community. Briefly describe the two primary elements of such a proposed – technical components and common APIs along with a vibrant, sustainable open source development community.

Technical Elements

Describe the technical elements of the proposal

• • Vendor & HW agnostic software development toolkits
  • Support for common APIs
  • Best practice white papers & SME access
  • Github tooling
  • Sample guides
  • Packaging and delivery

Development Community

Describe the community elements of the proposal

• Community constituents – active, participating members from broad constituent topics:
  • Civic
  • Commercial
  • Academic
  • Individual
• Open, transparent governance model
• Open source licensing and copyright retention (by participants)
• Best practices re modern open source communities
• Growing and sustaining an active community
• Naming – leverage of and differentiation to other “CitySKD” projects

Goals of the CitySDK proposal

• How the CitySDK will help the GCTC Transportation SuperCluster
• How the CitySDK will help the other GCTC SuperClusters
• How the CitySDK will help the overall community & marketplace
• Break goals into time periods – next 12 months, next 24 months, next 36 months

Next Steps and Conclusions

• Summarize the proposal
• Detail proposed next steps
  • Gaining consensus
  • Building a critical mass
  • Launching a community/project
  • Initial activities
• Cross-reference between the varied Supercluster activities and teams

References

• Papers, talks, proposals, etc. that were major sources of inspiration
• Other CitySDK projects
• Relevant Federal references
• Other references
• Federal initiatives