As smart cities gain traction on the 5G highway, US Ignite and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) partner to create methods and roadmaps for data sharing.
According to Mike Nawrocki, ATIS vice president for technology and solutions, cities have been building out their resources for improved data management across their operational departments. The partnership between US Ignite and ATIS addresses the issue of secure data sharing across cities, third parties, and others to put data toward greater uses.
Government Technology reported that smart cities need to exchange data with multiple entities – government agencies, other cities, citizens, and businesses. Data catalog specification is the future blueprint designed to aid in the unrestricted exchange of data.
“The data catalog would not just capture the data, but would also capture, ‘what is the level of sharing of the data with respect to the privacy,’” said Praveen Ashok, technical program manager at US Ignite.
“It’s a much more complex environment that’s evolving, where you have cities that want to work with different data partners. So that’s really what was behind this work,” Nowrocki said.
Acting as a single place for numerous data sets, the exchange simplifies how existing data portals are found. “It serves as sort of a card catalog, a search tool,” said Paul Sorenson, director of the St. Louis Regional Data Alliance. “Everything before was scattered all over the floor, and it was hard to find. We put it all in a box.”
The St. Louis Regional Data Exchange (RDX) this week launched an open-data portal for the St. Louis metro region. According to Government Technology, the portal unites data sets related to transportation, health, housing, and other public data sets.
“Most of the major challenges, in our region, and in many regions, cross geographies or cross sectors, and our data typically doesn’t,” said Sorenson. “So what we want to do is limit the time people spend trying to find data or wrestle it into some sort of usable form and start proactively trying to connect those dots around critical issues in our region.”
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