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Integrating Distributed Data Storage of a Smart City Public
Administration
Carmelo Pino, Salvatore Ravidà and Santo Scibilia
University of Catania, Department of Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering (DIEEI),
V.le Andrea Doria, 6, 95125 Catania, Italy
Keywords: Smart City, e-Government, Cloud Computing, Data Storage Integration, RDF.
Abstract: The developments and increasing solutions offered by Cloud Computing technologies represent a great
opportunity for e-governance of smart-cities. The benefits provided by Cloud-based technologies allow us
to re-design new services to solve many problems afflicting e-governance and public administration in each
country. In particular, one of the primarily need of Public Administration (PA) is the interoperability be-
tween the different areas and districts, which is rather complex due to the lack of standard schemes for data
modeling. In this paper we propose a cloud-based approach for supporting such interoperability by a cus-
tomizable DBMS mapping tool especially dedicated to smart city governance.
1 INTRODUCTION
As known, a smart city arises when citizens are
ready to use technologies to improve relevant city
life aspects such as governance, local development,
cultural events, mobility and logistics, environment
and health services (Chourabi et al., 2012), (Berthon
et al., 2011). Cloud computing can be considered as
a collection of technologies to store or process data
through the use of distributed hardware/software
over a virtualized Network. It’s a model for structur-
ing IT resources that redefines the way to manage
computer systems (Rimal et al., 2009), (Dillon et al.,
2010). Nowadays, the diffusion of Cloud Computing
and the perception of its benefits represents an op-
portunity to increase the capabilities of the e-
governance in term of offered services, cost reduc-
tion, distributed data storage, security management
(Mukherjee and Sahoo, 2012), (Ramgovind et al.,
2010), scalability, accountability, interoperability
(Cellary and Strykowski, 2009), and reliability
(Chandra and Bhadoria, 2012).
Among the different challenges in e-governance
the interoperability between the existing hardware,
software and data storage is a major issue (Smitha et
al., 2012) that often systems providing e-services in
different administrative units are not able to guaran-
tee.
There exists several e-governance applications
and services that can be categorized at different
levels: Government to Government (G2G), Gov-
ernment to Business (G2B), Government to Citizens
(G2C) and Government to Enterprise (G2E) (Jeong,
2007), (Giordano et al., 2013), (Faro et al.,2008),
(Constanzo et al., 2012). Each category is related to
a specific set of applications and the common need
is the communication between multiple data sources
(e.g. the storage related to “municipal maintenance”
has the need to retrieve data about a citizen from the
“registry office storage”). The miscellaneous of data
contained in different archives suggests the use of
RDF or OWL to define a common semantic schema
to map the different terms used in the various data
bases with the same meaning to a standard vocabu-
lary of concepts.
Interoperability is therefore one of main issue for
the development of future e-government systems,
called in following as e-gov systems, which can be
tackled with the use of cloud computing (Tripathi
and Parihar, 20119) and the advantages provided by
its model of services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and distri-
bution (Public, Private, Hybrid) (Armbrust et al.,
2010).
In this paper we propose a private cloud archi-
tecture for supporting the interoperability and inte-
gration between distributed e-gov data storages. The
idea behind this work is to collect each data storage
239
Pino C., Ravidà S. and Scibilia S..
Integrating Distributed Data Storage of a Smart City Public Administration.
DOI: 10.5220/0004407802390243
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Smart Grids and Green IT Systems (SMARTGREENS-2013), pages 239-243
ISBN: 978-989-8565-55-6
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)