A lot of public decision are taken at the level of the city. Smart Cities have not been part of the GEOSS activities, albeit citizens can benefit from derived services. Purpose of this task is to promote the use of Earth observations in Smart Cities and to bring Smart City sensor reading into GEOSS (mostly in-situ), so that they can be used in combination with other data sets to make derived products, validate, calibrate or qualify other sources of data or build a rapid evaluation assessment of the situation in case of crisis situations.
In a sense, Smart City readings can be seen as a parallel to citizen science contributions, but having a better ‘quality label’ coming from an official authoritative and authenticated source of information.
Smart Cities share a lot of GEO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), so they benefit from the Earth observation data and better understand how they contribute to the SDGs.
NextGEOSS maps the smart city KPI (ISO 37120) to the GEO SDG indicators, so that indicator information can be more exchanged.
The European Commission funds 10 Smart City Lighthouse projects (with both large and small cities across Europe) with which NextGEOSS promotes the use of Earth observation information as well as liaise with Smart City associations and consortia.