The Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) network said that these mechanisms have been implemented in Antwerp, Manchester, Helsinki, Milan, and Porto, among others
The Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) network, which is a coalition of 124 cities from 24 countries, have formally adopted so-called Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) as universal tools for achieving interoperability of systems, data, and services between cities and global suppliers, the coalition said in a statement.
Formal approval of the MIMs took place during a vote in January at the OASC Council of Cities, where all cities of the global network are represented.
“With this vote, we see OASC maturing as an organization and multiplying its efforts to support member cities and communities on their path of digital transformation,”said Bart Rosseau, OASC Council of Cities coordinator and chief data officer of the city of Ghent, in Belgium. “The OASC MIMs are the key ingredient for cost-effective innovation and procurement for cities around the world as they allow companies to develop once and deploy many times. This drives down cost dramatically. MIMs also allow cities to avoid vendor lock-in, a big problem in the market today.
“Almost as important as the adoption of the MIMs by the OASC member cities, is the fact that cities are finally talking standards. They are finding out just how important standards are when procuring new digital services. We are reaching a new level of awareness which will only help cities”, Rosseau added.
“By implementing the MIM approach, cities will be able to innovate and procure new services based on open standards. This marks a new era of open and interoperable smart cities amd communities,” said Martin Brynskov, chair of OASC.
The MIMs have already been implemented in the cities of Antwerp (Belgium), Manchester (UK), Helsinki (Finland), Santander (Spain), Milan (Italy), Eindhoven (Netherlands), Carouge (Switzerland), Porto (Portugal), Seongnam (South Korea), and Bordeaux (France).
In the coming six months, these cities as well as new cities and companies selected through the SynchroniCity open call will roll out new services based on MIMs. Initially, 49 market deployments will be implemented in a 18 cities, OASC said.
The OASC coalition of cities was founded in December 2017 and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Its mission is to unite cities around the world to build a global market for smart city data and services from the demand side and based on the needs of cities and communities. OASC is supported by institutional partners Aarhus University (Denmark), Business Tampere (Finland), Future Cities Catapult (UK), and imec (Belgium).
