For the last 20 years, Semantic Arts has been helping firms design and build enterprise ontologies to get them on the data-centric path. We have learned many lessons from the enterprise that can be applied in the construction of smart city ontologies.
What is similar between the enterprise and smart cities?
- They both have thousands of application systems. This leads to thousands of arbitrarily different data models, which leads to silos.
- The enterprise and smart cities want to do agile, BUT agile is a more rapid way to create more silos.
What is different between the enterprise and smart cities?
- In the enterprise, everyone is on the same team working towards the same objectives.
- In smart cities there are thousands of different teams working towards different objectives. For example:
Utility companies.
Sanitation companies.
Private and public industry.
- Large enterprises have data lakes in data warehouses.
- In smart cities there are little bits of data here and there.
What have we learned?
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
20 years of Enterprise Ontology construction and implementation has taught us some lessons that apply to Smart City ontologies. The Smart City Landscape informs us how to apply those lessons, which are:
Think big and start small.
Simplicity is key to integration.
Low code / No code is key for citizen developers.
Semantic Arts gave this talk at the W3c Workshop on Smart Cities originally recorded on June 25, 2021. Click here to view the talks and interactive sessions recorded for this virtual event. A big thank you to W3C for allowing us to contribute!
