# Urban Open Platform for Borderless Smart Cities
## 2 Urban Open Platform: Vision and Architecture  
### The Vision of Urban Open Platform  
The vision of the Urban Open Platform (initially developed by Carlo Ratti Associati, under the label of Urban Operating System in 2016 for the H2020 project FinEst Twins) is quite simple. Deploying a network of sensors that can capture real-time data from a myriad of occurrences in the city and connecting such sensors to an urban information system helps to better analyse and transform such data into knowledge (see Figure 1). As a result, new types of urban efficiencies, products and services for city dwellers can be created. In turn, users can access an open-access digital services delivery platform via a smartphone or laptop all the way up to digitally enhanced infrastructures such as responsive public spaces, intelligent transport systems or smart energy infrastructure. The city becomes a permanent platform for interaction, providing a unique mix of services to each user. Furthermore, by giving users the capability to develop their own solutions and services, a more inclusive and bottom-up model of both social and economic development will be created while jumpstarting local dynamics. Organisations that design systems tend to reflect the organisational structure in the architecture [19]. In a diverse organisation such as a city, this has caused challenges in both the enterprise and the data architecture. Common data warehouses have had a limited scope, such as supporting financial and HR functions, while the operational systems remain on their own. When data platforms have been created to support advanced analytics and business intelligence, the overall enterprise architecture has been split into two main functions: an operational plane (operational systems, often legacy) and analytical plane (data warehouses, data lakes, BI). The link between the two planes has typically been an ETL process defined for each data pipe. The larger the organisation, the more challenging this approach has been to govern and maintain. The vast amount of data coming in from IoT and automation systems has also raised the concern whether it is feasible to store everything on a central data lake. An Urban Open Platform shifts the focus from centric data platforms towards cross-organisational capabilities and empowering domain specialists with data acquisition and manipulation functions. Cities cannot foresee a future where hundreds of data engineers would be employed to manage the new data pipelines required for situational awareness. The platform is a collection of components with connectors and APIs that can be \"wired\" together in different ways to meet the various and evolving data integration and context enhancement needs. These tasks should not require programming experience but be available for domain specialists as a user-friendly, self-service platform. The divisions and departments of the cities can continue maintaining their own data marts and lakes, but policy management and advanced data catalogues with discovery options make it possible to adopt the layers of data governance both at the unit and enterprise levels. The data analytics in the operational plane are supported by stream processing capabilities and data virtualisation. With this approach, it is more feasible to analyse large amounts of data, such as the current state of city street lights, without having to create a massive time-series data store. For this to be achievable, the following properties must be inherent to the system:  
**Architecture:** The data management layer provides standardisation and a storage function for the platform, facilitating the analysis of long-term sensor data. The UOP would be the primary conductor of various data streams used by the various digital services between two cities. **Integrating data streams:** Ubiquitous sensors and sensor networks such as building automation systems are increasingly providing data sources of different contents, formats and qualities.