City Data Plan: The Conceptualisation of a Policy Instrument for Data Governance in Smart Cities

Abstract

This paper presents the conceptualisation of the City Data Plan, a data governance policy instrument intended to connect the production and use of urban data in a comprehensive and evolutive long-term strategy aligned with city development goals. The concept of the City Data Plan had been elaborated by taking into account current issues related to privacy and manipulation of data in smart city. The methodological approach adopted to define the nature of a City Data Plan is grounded on the conceptual and empirical parallelism with corporate data governance plans and general urban plans, respectively aimed to regulate decision-making powers and actions on data in enterprise contexts, and the interests of local stakeholders in the access and use of urban resources. The result of this analytic process is the formulation of the outline of a City Data Plan as a data governance policy instrument to support the iterative negotiation between the instances of data producers and data users for instantiating shared smart city visions. The conceptualisation of the City Data Plan includes a description of the multi-stakeholder organisational structures for the city data governance, cooperation protocols and decision areas, responsibilities assignments, components of the plan and its implementation mechanisms.

A Literature Review of Data Governance and Its Applicability to Smart Cities

“…For example, anonymization and re-identification of data are discussed by An et al [55] and Calzada and Almirall [56]. Privacy is often discussed in the literature as a concern in the urban context and as a requirement of governance [16,17,56,57,58]. A particular emphasis is put on sharing personal data between companies and institutions [55,56,57,59,60].…”

“…The first is the collaborative [59,60] and comprehensive [55] character of data governance. The multidisciplinary stakeholders [64] in the organization must be considered, as described in the stakeholder context, as must the alignment [16] of stakeholders' needs and interests [55]. Data governance in organizations is also related to the transformation and change process [59].…”

“…Data governance can help overcome these challenges and create semantic compatibility between different technologies and data silos and bring stakeholders together through standardized data processes, data models and policies [11,12,13]. While many publications deal with ICT architectures and IoT implementations in cities [9,14,15], only a few studies focus on data governance in an urban context [16,17,18]. We want to promote research on urban data governance by providing an initial perspective for future studies.…”

Governança de dados aplicada ao planejamento urbano municipal

“…Por exemplo, em [Psyllidis et al 2015],é proposto um framework para o desenvolvimento de um sistema que dê suporteà tomada de decisão em um município a partir de dados heterogêneos usando métodos de ciência dos dados, integração semântica e crowdsourcing. Já em [Lupi 2019], foi elaborado um modelo para a gerenciar a produção e a obtenção de dados sobre o município e sua utilização pelos stakeholders locais a partir da governança de dados.…”

“…Dessa forma, o verdadeiro problema nãoé a inexistência de dados sobre um município, mas sim a heterogeneidade desses dados, uma vez que podem ser disponibilizados de forma descentralizada por fontes independentes e possuir organizações diferentes, ou, ainda, conter inconsistências ou informações sensíveis [Lupi 2019]. Portanto, o objetivo desse trabalhoé o desenvolvimento de uma solução capaz de lidar com dados heterogêneos, integrá-los e disponibilizá-los a partir de um processo que garanta a qualidade, a segurança e o valor das informações a fim de apoiar a tomada de decisões no planejamento urbano municipal.…”