City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

2. Motivation: Sensor Data Fusion For Smart City Application

Data from citizens, systems, and general things flow through our cities thanks to the wide spread adoption of smart phones, sensor networks, social media and growing open release of datasets (Antonelli et al., March 19-20, Athens, Greece, 2014). The data from Smart cities present a grand challenge to researchers and smart cities promoters, as we need to take advantage of these streams of information to build new services and define a clear return of investment for the benefit of the society (Jara, Genoud, & Bocchi, 2014).

The challenge in smart city is not to build a single generic model e.g. weather model based on temperature and humidity, complex models about noise pollution, traffic etc., but to combine all these together to build a good predictive contextually rich model. This model will help understand the dynamics of the society, and most importantly provide vital knowledge back to the citizens in order to enhance their quality of life.

A recent work from a group of researchers from MIT (Sobolevsky et al., 2015) demonstrate the potential of fusing data from disparate data sources in smart city to understand a city’s attractiveness. The work focuses on cities in Spain and shows how the fusion of big data sets can provide insights into the way people visit cities. Such a correlation of data from a variety of data sources play a vital role in delivering services successfully in smart cities of the future.