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Facilitating the Development of IoT Applications in Smart City Platforms

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Book cover End-User Development (IS-EUD 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11553))

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Abstract

In smart city domain, several IoT platforms exist for supporting city managers and operators in controlling and managing events occurring in the city and making decisions to improve citizens’ quality of life. In such systems, for the combination of heterogonous events operators have to manually face the interoperability barriers that arise when dealing with IoT devices belonging to cross-domain IoT platforms. This paper focuses on how to provide city operators with visual and easy-to-use strategies for developing IoT applications that need to access and integrate data originated by various devices spread through a city that communicate according to different communication protocols, event formats, structures and sometimes meaning. The purpose of these strategies is to reduce the time required for the development of IoT applications and the number of mistakes in the configuration of the IoT devices. In details, we propose a solution developed in Node-RED, a visual programming tool for wiring together sensors, actuators and services. Our contribution aims at presenting a solution specifically tailored for domain experts who need to develop different kinds of analysis on city data who are not computer experts, but experts in monitoring weather, traffic, or events that happen in the city. A usability analysis is finally reported in order to assess the design strategies that we have developed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://ifttt.com.

  2. 2.

    http://www.atooma.com/.

  3. 3.

    https://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes.

  4. 4.

    H = T + 0.5555 * (6.112 * 10(7.5*T/(237.7+T) * UR/100) − 10) where T = temperature in Celsius, while UR = relative humidity.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Select4Cities Consortium and all the participants in the user evaluation for supporting our work with useful feedbacks about the real needs of smart cities like Antwerp, Helsinki, and Florence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Stefano Valtolina, Fatmeh Hachem, Barbara Rita Barricelli, Elefelious Getachew Belay, Sara Bonfitto & Marco Mesiti

Authors
  1. Stefano Valtolina
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  2. Fatmeh Hachem
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  3. Barbara Rita Barricelli
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  4. Elefelious Getachew Belay
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  5. Sara Bonfitto
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  6. Marco Mesiti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefano Valtolina .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

    Alessio Malizia

  2. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Stefano Valtolina

  3. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Anders Morch

  4. Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK

    Alan Serrano

  5. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Andrew Stratton

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Valtolina, S., Hachem, F., Barricelli, B.R., Belay, E.G., Bonfitto, S., Mesiti, M. (2019). Facilitating the Development of IoT Applications in Smart City Platforms. In: Malizia, A., Valtolina, S., Morch, A., Serrano, A., Stratton, A. (eds) End-User Development. IS-EUD 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11553. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24781-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24781-2_6

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