The future of Smart Cities
VITAL is an ambitious R&D programme that has developed a prototype application platform with the potential to revolutionise real-time, location-based provision of goods and services in smart cities, by integrating and interacting with a multitude of different Internet of Things data sources and systems.
The project consortium has brought together leading smart city thinkers and world leading developers from seven countries, as well as two of the world’s great cities, London and Istanbul, where the prototype has been trialed in complex, diverse and sophisticated environments.
The Internet of Things is a fast-growing and pervasive reality. Millions of physical entities – from consumer products to transport vehicles, from event locations to human beings – are recorded and tracked in time and space. The usefulness of this data, however, is often severely restricted by fragmentation, incompatibility and lack of interoperability of data sources and systems. VITAL has addressed this by developing a federated middleware platform connecting internet-connected objects (regardless of source platform or architecture) with unlimited potential smart city applications, creating filtering and processing protocols as well as a range of tools for both data providers and end-user application developers.
VITAL was developed between 2013 and 2016, and the resulting prototype is being trialed in various real life situations. The development of VITAL was supported by the European Union’s seventh framework research programme for the development of smart cities.