I³City: An Interoperated, Intelligent, and Integrated Platform for Smart City Ecosystem

Although much effort has been devoted to the construction of the smart city, the current development is still in a chaotic situation and lacks a unified, integrated, and friendly ecosystem. To narrow the gap, in this article, we propose an interoperated, intelligent, and integrated platform called I3City to construct a sustainable ecosystem for the smart city. We develop system interoperation to break down the barriers of information islands, and open up data and functionalities of various systems. By fusing multisource heterogeneous urban data, we provide common intelligent services of knowledge and support for various upper-layer smart city applications, based on urban knowledge management and city profiling. We further develop an integrated service platform for the development and operation of the smart city based on cloud computing. We use a case to illustrate the advantages of I3City in practice. With several open problems discussed, we expect to stimulate more research interest in the smart city.