Information infrastructures for the development and self-management of smart territories

In recent years, intensive work has been done in the field of smart cities. As a result of this work, the multiple ongoing standardization processes related to them can be highlighted. However, where the cities end the rural territory begins, and now an opportunity opens to transfer the progress made there, with the aim of developing smart rural territories. These territories would be those that, being rural or open (less than 10% of their surface is urbanized), want for their inhabitants the same level of development, opportunities and quality of life that they could achieve in a smart city.

This project seeks to contribute to the development of smart rural territories by proposing the implementation of Information Infrastructures in them. These Information Infrastructures will make it possible to interconnect the ICT and human resources of rural territories, optimize costs and support the discovery and exploitation of the information necessary to guide decision-making that allows progress towards the established objectives.

To achieve this, we will work to achieve the following objectives:

• Design a system architecture for Information Infrastructures adapted to smart rural territories, taking into account their specific problems and objectives, and use it to guide the creation of a prototype that allows validating it and supporting the rest of the activities of this proposal.
• Take concepts and progress indicators developed for smart cities and transfer them to smart rural territories. Specifically, it proposes to work in two areas: smart governance and smart mobility. These two areas have been chosen because they are based on the hypothesis that they are the extremes of the complexity of adaptation to smart rural territories. It is assumed that the first will be relatively easy to move, but that the second will be quite different (eg public transport in a city and in rural areas are very different).
• Identify the existing information resources on the Internet, official and unofficial, that can be used to manage a smart rural territory, for example, calculating the defined indicators, establish the pairings, gateways or ontologies necessary to integrate this information and create the necessary technology so that this integration is automatic, periodic and is supported by an Information Infrastructure.
• Develop the technology for the construction of scorecards for smart rural territories, and use it to implement at least one that feeds on the information resources described in the previous point.

All the work carried out will be validated by integrating the results in a pilot case in a rural territory in collaboration with the project's EPOs. This pilot will also be a key piece in the project's results transfer strategy. Finally, it should be noted that all the software that is developed will be made public as it is created.