An urban fault reporting and management platform for smart cities

A good interaction between public administrations and citizens is imperative in modern smart cities. Semantic web technologies can aid in achieving such a goal. We present a smart urban fault reporting web platform to help citizens in reporting common urban problems, such as street faults, potholes or broken street lights, and to support the local public administration in responding and fixing those problems quickly. The tool is based on a semantic data model designed for the city, which integrates several distinct data sources, opportunely re-engineered to meet the principles of the Semantic Web and linked open data. The platform supports the whole process of road maintenance, from the fault reporting to the management of maintenance activities. The integration of multiple data sources enables increasing interoperability and heterogeneous information retrieval, thus favoring the development of effective smart urban fault reporting services. Our platform was evaluated in a real case study: a complete urban reporting and road maintenance system has been developed for the municipality of Catania. Our approach is completely generalizable and can be adopted by and customized for other cities. The final goal is to stimulate smart maintenance services in the "cities of the future".