PROPOSED Web-based Digital Twins for Smart Cities Interest Group Charter

Scope

Standards are essential for Smart City technology and business development. Standards benefit vendors, cities, and users. For vendors, standards unify markets and mean that a larger market can be addressed with a single product design, allowing products to more efficiently make returns on the investments needed to develop them. For cities, standards allow the deployment of technologies that can be sourced from multiple vendors, more and higher quality products, and increases the probability that systems will remain usable over a longer timescale. Standards also encourage the development of open systems that can interoperate with other standardized systems, multiplying the number of use cases that can be addressed. For users, standardized technologies mean that services available in one city will also be available in others, facilitating mobility.

However, we need to know what standards should be developed to achieve these objectives. What gaps exist? What opportunities can be exposed by standards that enable new use cases? What are the business drivers that encourage adoption of standards, and how can standard development be aligned with these drivers? Given a set of standards that could be developed, what are the priorities? How can the needs and goals of all stakeholders be aligned?

The purpose of this Interest Group is collect and connect Smart City stakeholders to answer these kinds of questions and drive the development of Web technology standards aligned with the real needs of Smart Cities.

The topics that the Interest Group will address include but are not limited to:

• Disaster countermeasure, including (1) prediction and prevention before disasters, (2) information sharing during/right after the disaster and (3) recovery from the disaster;
• Transportation, both public and private;
• Logistics, including last-mile delivery of goods and services;
• Infrastructure, including IoT-based sensing and actuation;
• Energy management and sustainability;
• Connection between climate crisis and smart cities;
• Relationship with Smart Buildings as part of the geolocation things like location of pipes;
• Signage, addressing the problem of timely delivery of information to a diverse population;
• Open data portals, including network APIs to data services and the development of app ecosystems;
• Data management, facilitating the rapid ingestion, storage, and dissemination of data
• Edge and cloud computing, allowing computation to be efficiently applied when and where needed;
• Payments, to allow services to be monetized, encouraging new business development and cost recovery;
• Privacy, to preserve the rights of citizens and other stakeholders;
• Security, to preserve the integrity and safety of systems and protect users;
• Accessibility, to incorporate design-for-all thinking throughout all aspects of smart city infrastructure, and ensure accessibility for people with disabilities in every activity and at every stage of life;
• Internationalization, to support diverse populations and tourism.

We can speculate about many topics, so need to identify what the group's key topics are and see what would fit with W3C through the discussion with the existing smart cities. Note that the topics listed above are related to each other, so the relationship among multiple topics should be described as concrete use cases, e.g., which topics to be considered in what kind of situation.

The main tasks that the Interest Group will undertake include:

• Identification of stakeholders from the industries, countries/cities and communities to involve in the group's discussion
• Survey on the existing technologies and standards for Smart Cities (Technology Landscape)
• Best Practices on what technologies, e.g., WoT, Automotive, Geospatial, VR/AR, Speech and Semantic Web, to be applied for what kind of Smart Cities applications, e.g., improved accessibility, visitor guidance and energy management.
• Smart Cities use cases to which Web technologies are applicable and requirements to provide better support for high priority use cases

The group should also consider the following when work on the above tasks:

• Identification and prioritization of gaps in Web standards for Smart City use cases;
• Incubation of technical solutions for the identified requirements by supporting the creation of Community Groups or Business Groups focusing on particular topics;
• Suggesting existing Working Groups to include particular topics in their scope as appropriate;
• Suggesting the creation of new Working Groups to address particular topics if no existing Working Group is appropriate;
• Tracking and review of Smart City-related deliverables developed by other W3C groups, and reporting of issues as appropriate;
• Coordination with other organizations to gather knowledge, coordinate input into W3C efforts, and promote development and use of W3C standards within Smart City applications;
• Ensuring issues of accessibility, device independence, internationalization, performance, privacy, and security are given equal consideration in all discussions and outcomes.

Accessibility is very important for smart cities because cities include many people potentially with disabilities. So we need to look for "missing data" within smart cities, i.e., data of those who might not be well-represented among the data-sets, to ensure that they are surely recognized and well-served by the smart cities. For that purpose, we need to consider people with multiple disabilities (intersectional considerations) and people with cognitive and learning disabilities too.

Note that there are many topics to discuss around Smart Cities and the scope of the group may become too broad. So we'd like to start with discussion about the following two points:

1. what a Web-based Digital Twin framework for for Smart Cities should be like based on the possible Web-based Data Connection Framework for Digital Twins in section 1.6 "Digital Twins” as the Key Concept" above
2. standardized vocabulary for Smart Cities based on the feedback from the Smart Cities stakeholders including the related SDOs and actual Smart Cities

The goal of the group is not to generate standard itself, but to gather pain points, requirements and priorities for Web-based smart cities in the near future. So we need to figure out the focus that W3C can make the most impact. We don't want to duplicate work already done by the other SDOs.