As we enter 2016, the world is facing a number of critical challenges such as global warming, economic crisis, security threats, inequality, natural disasters and ageing society. Urban areas are particularly affected, given that the world population is increasingly concentrated in those areas. IoT, cloud and big data are today’s key enablers for increasing the efficiency in using shared urban infrastructure, economic and natural resources. The overall concept of the BigClouT project is to give an analytic mind to the city by creating distributed intelligence that can be implanted in the whole city network. The unprecedented number of connected things and the associated big data naturally raise new technical challenges in terms of interoperability, scalable and online data processing, actionable knowledge extraction, self-management, security and privacy. The BigClouT project brought together resources and knowledge necessary from prestigious European and Japanese institutions for tackling those challenges. As a joint effort, BigClouT built a city data collection, processing and redistribution platform, data lake and associated tools to face the aforementioned chalenges. The platform and tools have been deployed and validated in 4 pilot cities in the project, Grenoble, Bristol, Tsukuba and Fujisawa, with real-life applications with real end-users. BigClouT gave a particular importance to the involvement of citizens during the whole lifetime of the project, from use case definitions to validation. BigClouT has also the ambitious objective of creating a community of external end-users to build their own applications/business on top of BigClouT tools and platform, and to maintain alive this community during the project and beyond, which will ensure the sustainability of the results of the ClouT and BigClouT projects. For this purpose, a global alliance has been created, namely Urban Technology Alliance, to sustain the results of the project and replicate them in other cities worldwide.
