An Urban Fault Reporting and Management Platform for Smart Cities Sergio Consoli Semantic Technology Laboratory, ISTC, National Research Council (CNR), Italy sergio.consoli@istc.cnr.it Valentina Presutti Semantic Technology Laboratory, ISTC, National Research Council (CNR), Italy valentina.presutti@istc.cnr.it Diego Reforgiato Recupero Semantic Technology Laboratory, ISTC, National Research Council (CNR), Italy diego.reforgiato@istc.cnr.it Gianni Cataldi Etna Hitech, R&D Division Viale Africa 31, Catania, Italy giovanni.cataldi@etnahitech.com Misael Mongiovì Semantic Technology Laboratory, ISTC, National Research Council (CNR), Italy misael.mongiovi@istc.cnr.it Wladimiro Patatu Etna Hitech, R&D Division Viale Africa 31, Catania, Italy vladimiro.patatu@etnahitech.com ABSTRACT A good interaction between public administrations and citizens is imperative in modern smart cities. Semantic web technologies can aid in achieving such a goal. We present a smart urban fault reporting web platform to help citizens in reporting common urban problems, such as street faults, potholes or broken street lights, and to support the local public administration in responding and fixing those problems quickly. The tool is based on a semantic data model designed for the city, which integrates several distinct data sources, opportunely re-engineered to meet the principles of the Semantic Web and linked open data. The platform supports the whole process of road maintenance, from the fault reporting to the management of maintenance activities. The integration of multiple data sources enables increasing interoperability and heterogeneous information retrieval, thus favoring the development of effective smart urban fault reporting services. Our platform was evaluated in a real case study: a complete urban reporting and road maintenance system has been developed for the municipality of Catania. Our approach is completely generalizable and can be adopted by and customized for other cities. The final goal is to stimulate smart maintenance services in the “cities of the future”. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.1. [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing – Government, H.3.5. [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Online Information Services – Web-based services, I.2.4. [Artificial Intelligence]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods – Semantic networks. General Terms Experimentation; Management; Standardization. Keywords Linked open data applications; smart cities; urban fault reporting and management; linked open data extraction and publication; e- government; semantic data modeling. 1. INTRODUCTION Urban population in cities has been foreseen to double by the middle of this century, according to the United Nations Global Health Observatory 1 . Cities are expected to deal with increasingly pressing issues such as environmental sustainability, economic growth and citizen mobility. Two trends are evident [18]. First, urban areas worldwide are rapidly increasing in scope and population. Second, with rapid advance and utilization of smart information and communication technologies (ICT), smart city services are becoming a norm rather than exception in developing and managing city services for citizens [17]. On top of a variety of city services developed throughout the industrialization in the last centuries, new services are being conceptualized, developed, and implemented over the last decades across the globe in cities [4][11]. Many cities are expanding their efforts to make their cities more competitive by becoming “more digitalized”, “intelligent” and “smarter” [21]. In the last few years, the smart city paradigm [7] has begun to spread in academic and industry fields, with the development of various solutions to address issues brought by the fast growing urbanization [5]. Besides, several local governments have invested heavily to improve public service delivery. FixMyStreet.com [16] was one of the first citizen-driven systems for road maintenance and general public service improvement. Other similar services today available are: PDX Reporter 2 , Citizen Connect 3 , Click Fix (SCF) 4 and CITY FEED [19]. In general, state-of-the-art works usually focus on urban crowdsourcing for improving local public services [3][6][12][23]. Following the citizen-centric smart city services classification by [18], these services belong to the AUMP (Automate–Utilitarian–Mandatory– Passive) typology, which consists of cases of automation of services falling into utilitarian, mandatory and passive categories. In particular they can be associated to the main class “Facility Management”, and the sub-class “Street Furniture Management”, including “Traffic/Street Facilities Maintenance Service”. For more details see also [4]. 1 http://www.who.int/gho/en/ 2 http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bts/article/419527 3 http://www.cityofboston.gov/doit/apps/citizensconnect.asp 4 http://it.seeclickfix.com/ Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). IW3C2 reserves the right to provide a hyperlink to the author's site if the Material is used in electronic media. WWW 2015 Companion, May 18–22, 2015, Florence, Italy. ACM 978-1-4503-3473-0/15/05 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2740908.2743910 535