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The ICING Project: eGovernment for innovative cities of the next generation
John Donovan
Head of Enterprise and Research Development Services, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland
Eoin Kilfeather
Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland
Frances M Buggy
Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
People can act as collectors of knowledge about the environments in which they find themselves. This knowledge is a valuable resource from which city administrations and other urban stakeholders would benefit if they were able to access it. However, citizens normally do not interact with their city other than to access basic information and to conduct financial transactions. In order to harness this unused, and often tacit, knowledge and make it explicit and available, the ICING (Innovative Cities for the Next Generation) project developed software and services to link citizens to their cities, using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
The result is the ICING platform that allows people to use many different communication devices to both contribute information to and access services from their city and from their fellow citizens. A range of ICING services (which are delivered using the ICING platform) was developed in consultation with end users - both ordinary people and city councils themselves.
Keywords
eGovernment, eGovernance, mGovernment, mobile services, location aware, issue tracker, user defined, citizen centric
Article Text
Future Exploitation of ICING
ICING was a Research and development project (Big R small d) and has successfully developed a technical prototype and surmounted a number of technical and social challenges in the process. However the platform as it currently exists does not allow a simple transfer from the three pilot city testbeds to other cities without further configuration and development.
While the next phase of ICING will involve optimisation of the code we have developed and perhaps even 're-wiring' of some elements of the platform the software has gone beyond the ‘beta' stage. Much of the work is in the Open Source domain and is attracting a vibrant community of developers.
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