Overcoming the barriers of using linked open data in smart city applications

Abstract

Accurate, reliable, and highly available data is one of the critical aspects of the proper development of a smart city. In this article, we study the benefits and challenges of using Linked Open Data in smart city applications highlighting their main adoption barriers like the lack of standardization, and the difficulties of publishing and consuming Open Data sources. Our research proposes a set of open-source, high-scalable, and mature tools to overcome these challenges, providing a complete description of how those components can be integrated to enable and improve the way to publish and consume Linked Open Data in the ecosystem of smart city applications and its technological enablers (IoT, Artificial Intelligence, etc.). Finally, we validate our proposal within the case of a public-rental bicycle system. The set of tools presented is agnostic to the field of application, thus, this case acts as a reference guide for other smart city applications.