DRAFT Smart Cities Interest Group Charter

The mission of the Smart Cities Interest Group is

Join the Smart Cities Interest Group.

This proposed charter is available on GitHub . Feel free to raise issues .

Start date [dd monthname 2020] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved)
End date [dd monthname 2022] (two year duration)
Charter extension See Change History .
Chairs Goal: 2-3 co-chairs
Team Contacts Kazuyuki Ashimura (0.2 FTE )
Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: Regular weekly calls will be held.
Face-to-face: we will meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 3 per year.
Workshop: A workshop with an open CFP and invited speakers may be organized to provide further feedback and input and the guide the group's agenda.

"Smart Cities" refers to a range of technologies and processes for intelligent management of our built and inhabited environment. As interest rises, we see prospects for smarter and easier integration of various technologies from multiple vendors related to IoT devices and Web services.

Several preliminary use cases on Smart Cities have been discussed within the Web of Thing (WoT) IG as part of the WoT standardization based on the proposal during the Second WoT Workshop in Munich . However, Smart Cities include various technologies, of which WoT is just one. So W3C organized a virtual online workshop on Smart Cities in June 2021 to finalize this Charter for the Smart Cities Interest Group to collect input from the Smart Citeis stakeholders.

During the workshop discussion, we did the following:

We also confirmed that it would be very important to consider inclusive design including accessibility, privacy, security, and internationalization. Smart City applications are tightly related to the people who live in cities. We want Smart City technology to have a positive impact on their lives and want to avoid unintended negative consequences.

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.

Scope

Note: This charter was drawn up as an outcome of the June 2021 W3C Workshop on Smart Cities .

Scope Summary

  • 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.
  • Use cases and requirements for Smart Cities

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 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:

We can speculate about many topics, so need to identfy what the group's key topics are and see what would fit with W3C through the discussion with the existing smart cities.

The main tasks that the Interest Group will undertake include:

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

During the group discussion, we'll continue to work on outreach Accessibility is very important for smart cities because cities include many people potentially with disabilities. So we need to clarify the primary stakeholders from look for "missing data" within smart cities, i.e., data of those who might not be well-represented among the industries, countries/cities and communities data-sets, to involve in ensure that they are surely recognized and well-served by the group's work. 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 would like to focus on data governance and privacy management for the first year based on the discussion during the workshop .

Out of Scope

The technical development of standards is not in scope for the Interest Group. Technical discussions are expected to take place within a new or existing W3C Working Groups, or within a Community Group or Business Group when incubation is needed.

Deliverables

The primary deliverables of the Smart Cities Interest Group will be IG Notes that identify requirements for existing and/or new technical specifications and gaps in the Web Platform.

Normative Specifications

The Interest Group will not deliver any normative specifications.

Other Deliverables

Other non-normative documents may be created such as:

  • 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.
  • Use cases and requirements for Smart Cities

Timeline

Put here a timeline view of all deliverables.

  • Month YYYY: First teleconference
  • Month YYYY: First face-to-face meeting
  • Month YYYY: Requirements and Use Cases for FooML
  • Month YYYY: FPWD for FooML
  • Month YYYY: Requirements and Use Cases for BarML
  • Month YYYY: FPWD FooML Primer

Success Criteria

Smart Cities vary widely and diversely. So we can wander into all sorts of areas if we don't get the right regulators to hear where they care. Terefore we need to make sure the group enrolls the support of implementers, the authorities and cities to get them involved to help set prioritization.

For that purpose, we need to identify important stakeholders and would start with a smaller team, e.g., Asian stakeholders like Singapore, Japan, China and Korea, and involve more countries/cities like Sweden, Brazil and NYC via the collaboration with the W3C Chapters and the attendees of the Smart Cities Workshop in June 2021 and the TPAC breakout sessions in October 2021 ( Day 1 , Day 2 ).

The Interest Group will have succeeded if it can achieve the following:

To achieve this, the Interest Group will organize regular conference calls to update members on progress of work items, and to invite other groups and organizations to present their work to Interest Group participants.

Coordination

For all deliverables, this Interest Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, performance, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG . The Interest Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each deliverable.

W3C Groups

Additional technical coordination with the following W3C Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document :

Virtical Use cases: Agriculture CG definition of use cases Media & Entertainment IG tbd Publishing BG tbd Primary:
Web of Things (WoT) IG/WG/CG
internet of things, discovery, edge computing)
Media and Entertainment IG
signage, video links
Web and Networks IG
edge computing, network metadata
Publishing BG / Publishing CG / EPUB 3 WG / Publishing WG
documentation, public communications, multimedia
Automotive WG
v2v comms, geolocation
Spatial Data on the Web IG
geolocation
Decentralized Identifiers (DID)WG / Verifiable Credentials (VC) WG / Credentials CG
identifiers, signing, credentials, authentications
Dataset Exchange WG
(geolocation, semantics, data modelling)
Immersive Web WG
VR, AR
GPU for the Web WG
ML, DL, edge computing
Big Data CG
data management, data modelling
Voice Interaction CG
tbd Voice agents for smart user interface
Solid CG
tbd Mechanisms to share private data in a controlled way
Agriculture CG
definition of agriculture use cases
Linked Building Data CG
Relationship with smart buildings as part of the geolocation use cacses
Secondary:
Web Authentication WG
security, credentials
Service Workers WG
edge computing
Devices and Sensors (DAS) WG
geolocation
JSON-LD WG / JSON for Linking Data CG
data modelling, semantics
Web Payments WG/Web Payment Security IG
payments
Web Real-Time Communications WG
video and data streams
Web Assembly WG
edge computing
Accessible Infographics CG
data visualization

External Organizations

SDOs working on Smart Cities:
IETF:
Coordination on communication protocols, data modelling, discovery, and security standards.
ITU-T:
Coordination on standards for telecommunication technologies and the use cases they enable.
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC):
Coordinated standards for geolocation and geographic information systems.
ISO
tbd
IEC
tbd
ISO/IEC JTC1
tbd
BSI
tbd
ETSI
tbd
ECLASS
tbd
Countries, Cities, Economic Unions and Communities (not limited to but incluiding the following):
ASEAN:
Discussion of smart city use cases and deployments in South-East Asia.
The World Economic Forum
tbd
The Smart City Consortium
tbd
The Smart Cities Council
tbd
TM Forum
tbd
Viable Citeis
tbd
Other countries, cities and communities to be added including developing countries and rural areas

Participation

To be successful, this Interest Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration. The chairs and editors are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Interest Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication .

The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy .

Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process ) to follow the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct .

Communication

Technical discussions for this Interest Group are conducted in public : the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of deliverables will be developed on a public repository and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Smart Cities Interest Group home page.

Most Smart City Interest Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular deliverables, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

This group primarily conducts its technical work on GitHub issues . The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work.

The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 3.3) . Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based Web-based survey), with a response period from one week to 10 working days , depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Interest Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs or the Director.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 3.4, Votes) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Disclosures

The Interest Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Interest Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Interest Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Interest Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation .

Licensing

This Interest Group will use the W3C Document license for all its deliverables.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 5.2 of the Process Document . In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Charter History

Note: Display this table and update it when appropriate. Requirements for charter extension history are documented in the Charter Guidebook (section 4) .

The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.3) :

Charter Period Start Date End Date Changes
Initial Charter [dd monthname yyyy] [dd monthname yyyy] none
Charter Extension [dd monthname yyyy] [dd monthname yyyy] none
Rechartered [dd monthname yyyy] [dd monthname yyyy]

[description of change to charter, with link to new deliverable item in charter] Note: use the class new for all new deliverables, for ease of recognition.