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4 CONCLUSIONS
In the paper we have sketched the project named K-
Metropolis aiming at integrating disparate urban
data bases to support user mobility and to provide e-
commerce and e-government services to desktop
PCs and mobiles.
Although the proposed data integration has been
carried out by filtering a list of XML records
collected from distant sites using simple select-
where like operations, this simple data integration
method is powerful enough to cover many relevant
use cases required by citizens and companies.
Since join operations between distributed data
bases may be useful too, the mentioned companion
paper, i.e., (Giordano et al., 2013), illustrates how K-
Metropolis is able to accomplish this complex task,
as well as it presents how the use of a powerful GIS
may be used to display not only geo-referenced data
of the points of interest but also maps that further
qualify the land use for urban studies or to design
suitable interventions to improve civil protection.
In particular, in this companion paper we show
how using RDF data representations instead of the
XML schemes may improve data integration and
illustrate the SPARQL queries that are able to access
distributed RDF triple stores to carry out both select
and join operations.
Let us note that many approaches have been
proposed to offer information services to mobile
users. The dedicated navigators installed on the cars,
e.g., Garmin and Tom-Tom, were the first examples
of this technology. They may be easily used by the
drivers, but provide only transport information that
don’t take into account very often the real time car
traffic flows.
Although some protocols have been proposed to
improve the real time functionalities of such
navigators, e.g., VANET described in (Offor, 2012),
the car navigators remain with a limited area of
application. In particular, they cannot be used easily
to support walking people mobility, neither can be
used to carry out e-commerce and e-government
tasks.
For this reason, different location based
information systems were proposed in the last years.
They are mainly resident on mobiles and appear to
be a new generation of location based services
(LBSs) that help better people mobility as well as
facilitate e-commerce and e-government operations,
as foreseen in (TRG, 2008).
However, all the proposed LBSs of this second
generation are mainly proprietary systems, so they
miss two basic requirements of the modern LBSs
that are at the basis of the K-Metropolis project, i.e.,
the requirements that the urban data bases should be
open and interoperable, as claimed in (Teller et al.,
2010).
Therefore, our future work will be mainly the
one to study carefully the available urban ontology,
e.g., (Teller et al., 2007; Berdier and Roussey,
2007), to choose the ones that favour the
implementation of an urban presentation layer based
on an standard vocabulary that allows the above
mentioned K-Metropolis applications, resident on
either the server or the mobiles, to access all the
public data available at citywide scale thus
supporting the activity of the mobile users as
completely and flexible as possible.
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