by Marcus Scheiber, Founder and Co-CEO, ms.Gis
To persistently ensure the best water quality for a Smart City like Vienna, real-time water monitoring and instant decision making are some of the areas where IoT and geospatial technologies are invaluable components that feed into a continuous situation awareness system. The city authorities and public works departments need to closely monitor and control all related infrastructures and water parameters to provide water in the right quantity and the best quality to their citizens.
IoT sensors can be installed along the way from spring to tap (at springs, in water bodies and infrastructures like transportation lines and distribution networks) to continuously monitor water parameters such as pH, temperature, pressure, dissolved oxygen, and even potential pollutants or contaminants. An IoT platform and systems guarantee the efficient streaming and storage for further processes like analytics, statistics, machine learning, and reporting, e.g.
Geospatial technologies and data can be considered as an essential foundation and component of any Smart City platform and operations. In addition to managing the location information of the above mentioned real-time IOT data-sources, geospatial technologies and open data sets provide the basic location and mapping framework to align any relevant geospatial information and to enable further processing like topologic operations, spatial analytics, pattern recognition, visualisation, and production of awareness maps of suitable detail and accuracy to enable further actions.
Although the management of a Smart City already benefits a lot from the before mentioned IoT and geospatial technologies, only the integration of these technologies into a seamless digital platform adds exponentially to the overall value for the city and her citizens.
FIWARE is the perfect framework to integrate these core technologies and components into a comprehensive yet still open solution for Smart Cities. FiWare is based on open standards, open-source components, and is ready to orchestrate data sources, (micro-)services, software components or even systems by the concepts of Context Brokers, NGSI-LD, and powerful APIs, the resulting seamless flow of information is key for further processing, analytics, visualisation, and finally leads to better decisions and actions for the city authorities and their citizens.
Overall, the integration of smart city technologies by the open source FIWARE suite, as well as geospatial (GIS) and real-time (IoT) software and platforms can enable effective and efficient management of water quality in urban areas, leading to improved public health, reduced risks, overall better resource utilisation, and enhanced environmental sustainability, just to name a few.
ms.GIS, a leading provider of geospatial & IoT solutions and a long-term FIWARE Gold Member, has been working with the City of Vienna for many years. We are focused on helping Smart Cities to digitise, automate, and orchestrate information to create real value from data for them and their citizens. We make integrated GIS & IoT solutions simple, fast, and affordable.
