The Smart City series of lectures span the fundamental ideas, visions and the technologies related to the development of services for the Smart City (or Society) and the Internet of Things. Join us at Goto 10.

When considering Interoperability in a Smart City, there seems to be an apparent contradiction between the requirement of Openness and Security. The choice seems to be between allowing others (anyone?) access to your devices, opening the solution to endless attacks and vulnerabilities, or hermetically sealing off your devices from the outside world, protecting your solution, but making it difficult, or practically impossible, to interoperate with others. The lecture presents a solution to this apparent contradiction. Strong global identities can be used to protect access to things and their data. They can also be used to allow others to discover discoverable devices. A method of defining ownership of information is presented.

By utilizing an infrastructure that provides things with decision support across their entire lifecycles, as well as knowledge about ownership, it becomes possible to model owner consent and provision access to devices and data in realtime, based on the desires of their corresponding owners, without impacting operation of the infrastructure. Thus, an Open and Secure Smart City can be built.

Participants are welcome to join the Smart City Labs as well, where we will experiment with the concepts presented in the lectures in a practical manner. Do you have things you want to get connected? Please bring them along, and I’ll help you connect them.