Integrating Heterogeneous Weather-Sensors Data into a Smart-City App

Abstract

Current weather information is one of the facilities supplied to the users by most travel and mobility systems. Most of them relies on one provider, who can deliver a more or less satisfactory coverage on different geographical areas. In this paper, we present the approach and discuss the rationale that drove the design and development of a mashup service for providing meteorological information within the research project TCUBE (“Transport Territory and Tourism“). TCUBE aims at the creation of a platform of services for travel and mobility in urban territory, with initial focus on Genoa metropolitan area. The goal of the project is to study, develop and validate technologies and solutions for the implementation, deployment, and management of advanced information services for citizens and visitors based on enabling technologies and methodologies such as: Open Data; crowd sourcing and social sharing; sensor infrastructures and services based on spatial data. The mashup service presented herein is able to exploit and integrate weather sensor data provided by the free contributions of citizen scientists' Personal Weather Stations belonging to heterogeneous Weather Networks. Design and technical details of our approach are supplied, thus to make it replicable in other similar urban contexts.