Solutions

A city runs parking, waste, lighting, transport and a GIS, each from a different supplier, each with its own idea of what a street is. Put those into one context and an operator can ask which lamps on a closed road stopped reporting, and get the answer in a single query.

The region is the next step up. In our reference deployment the city holds its air quality stations and the region shows them on one map next to its own district towns, without copying a single reading and with the city’s policy deciding what the region may see. The open data portal benefits without extra work, because the same entities can be published in a documented format instead of being exported to CSV by hand every quarter.

Meters, heat substations, building automation and a BIM model describe the same building from four sides. Joined up, a consumption figure comes with the room it belongs to, what that room is used for, and when it was last renovated, which is what turns a number into a work order. When the utility and the building owner are different organisations, the data space connector carries the agreement and the policy carries the boundary.

Plant historians, SCADA, maintenance systems and geographic asset data rarely meet. A shared context makes asset health readable across all four and leaves the operational systems untouched, which is usually the condition for being allowed to try anything at all. Vendor systems that already speak NGSI-LD plug in by registration and keep their own data.

Consortium projects have to show interoperability in the deliverable, not only in the proposal. We build the NGSI-LD layer, the data models and the federation between partner sites, and we document them well enough that they survive the review and outlast the project. We have done it once already: three organisations, three clusters, one query, written up with the measurements in a research paper.