Welcome to the Smart City Concept Model

The Smart City Concept Model has been developed to describe a framework in which data flowing around a city, can be discovered and joined up.

The model is relevant where many ORGANISATIONs provide SERVICEs to many COMMUNITYs within a PLACE.

So it's not just for cities: it can be used wherever organisations want to share data to benefit those that they serve.

Development of the model

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) in the UK commissioned BSI (the British Standards Institution) to develop the model within the standards strategy for smart cities in the UK.

The model has been published by BSI as PAS 182: Smart city concept model – Guide to establishing a model for data interoperability.

PAS 182 is intended to facilitate discussions between decision-makers from each sector and the specialists who build and design the systems and services that enable the city to function. The components of the model can form the basis of these discussions, by aligning ontologies to discover where data from different sectors is about the same thing or is related in a useful way.

This website was originally created as a tool to enable those supporting LeGSB to view, use and comment on the model as it was developed. It has now been made generally available to those wishing to make use of PAS 182 in modelling data for their own cities and organisations.

The Local eGovernment Standards Body (LeGSB) led the steering group for BSI.

Definition of the model

The model defines a series of 27 concepts that can be used to describe the entities that are typically contained in city data, and goes on to highlight where those concepts are linked for city scenarios. Each concept has been selected for relevance in describing data that is valuable to share across a city and for applicability across different sectors.

Examples of concepts from the model include:

  • community: a group of persons and/or organizations that share common characteristics such as place, circumstance etc;
  • assumption: a predicted or presumed state;
  • objective: an achievement desired by an agent;
  • service: the capacity to carry out one or more methods.

With a common understanding of these concepts, decision-makers can share and re-use information.

Using only the four concepts listed above, organisations of any type can publish information about:

  • the services that they offer;
  • the communities they serve;
  • the assumptions they have made about those communities;
  • how they have shaped objectives, which in turn influence the design of services.

If combined in an organised and commonly understood way, this information can form a valuable operational resource for a city’s citizens, and a basis for collaboration and innovation in the use of a city’s resources. Each concept has a definition, some explanatory notes, examples of how that concept might feature in city data and a diagram to show how it is typically related to other concepts in the model.