SmartCities

Southampton became the first of the UK's Smart Cities as a result of a major project supported by the EC's IST Programme. SmartCities, a 36 month pilot project, introduced the latest generation of smart cards to Southampton citizens and University students. The scheme has been designed to be replicable in other European cities.

The SmartCities consortium developed a dynamic smart card and multi-application management architecture to allow target markets (middle-sized cities) to benefit from the numerous advantages of multi-application smart cards. Smart cards are a powerful means of enabling public and commercial service providers to capture the information they need to improve services, deliver better value to citizens and enhance social inclusion.

IT Innovation developed a multi-tier card information analysis system to enable information workers to perform powerful analysis techniques on large amounts of data over potentially low-bandwidth remote connections.

The Southampton SmartCities scheme is now operational. Card holders use the SmartCities card to access and pay for services in the city such as libraries, leisure venues and public transport. The card can hold data for different organisations, such as Southampton City Council and the University of Southampton.

IT Innovation brought to SmartCities data analysis skills which we have developed through R&D in data warehousing and knowledge discovery technologies in numerous projects over many years. We also have extensive experience in systems architecture and systems integration, and in particular state-of-the-art capability in the analytical aspects of the work.

Shortly after the end of the IST project, Schlumberger's IT Services businesses were sold to Atos Origin; the Schlumberger business which led the IST SmartCities project became Axalto and subsequently combined with Gemplus to form Gemalto, and several members of the team involved in the project left to set up Unicard.

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The SmartCities project received research funding from the EC's IST Programme.