Information centric services in Smart Cities

A Smart City is intended as an urban environment which, supported by pervasive ICT systems, is able to offer advanced and innovative services to citizens in order to improve the overall quality of their life. In this context, the present contribution formulates a pioneering proposal, by drawing an advanced information centric platform for supporting the typical ICT services of a Smart City. It can easily embrace all available and upcoming wireless technologies, while enforcing, at the same time, ubiquitous and secure applications in many domains, such as, e-government and public administration, intelligent transportation systems, public safety, social, health-care, educational, building and urban planning, environmental, and energy and water management applications. All the details of the proposed approach have been carefully described by means of pragmatical use-cases, such as the management of administrative procedures, the starting of a new business in a given country, the navigation assistance, the signaling of an urban accident aimed at improving the public safety, the reservation of a medical examination, the remote assistance of patients, and the management of waste in a city. This description makes evident the real effectiveness of the present proposal in future urban environments. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.