Urban mashups

Abstract

Cities are alive: they rise, grow, evolve like living beings. The state of a city changes continuously, influenced by a lot of factors, both human (people moving in the city or extending it) and natural ones (rain or climate changes). Cities are potentially huge sources of data of any kind and for the last years a lot of effort has been put in order to create and extract those sources. This scenario offers a lot of opportunities for mashup developers: by combining and processing the huge amount of data (both public and private) is possible to create new services for urban stakeholders—citizens, tourists, etc. In this chapter, we illustrate the challenges in developing mashups for the urban environments: starting out from the specificity of cities and the availability of urban data and services, we describe a number of scenarios for urban mashups, we present our experience in realizing demonstrators of urban mashups and we discuss the lesson learned and the implications for citizens, tourists and municipalities.