High-quality data – the cornerstone of a smart city

Some of the first things we think about when talking about a smart city are automation, efficiency and high-tech solutions. What are some of the problems that can be solved with the help of technology in a modern city, and what else is essential for this to happen?

Where can IT systems help in a smart city?

IT applications and systems make the life of our city much easier and allow many tasks to be carried out much faster than was possible in the pre-digital era. From filing a tax return to finding the best connection for public transport, all this can be done in minutes or even seconds thanks to the contribution of IT applications. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because IT systems primarily support our basic needs – such as access to electricity, water or the internet. We don't usually think too much about how any of these work - as long as it happens and we have uninterrupted access to these goods and services. This smooth operation is partly possible thanks to IT systems – in this case, network inventory systems, which have the most up-to-date information about each element of a network – be it an electrical network or a telecommunications network.
In the event of a disruption, the network owner or manager may check where the failure occurred and take appropriate action as soon as possible.
Such systems are not only useful when emergency situations arise, but whenever access to information about the network is needed – either to look for possibilities for its further development and expansion, or to keep it in operation and to prevent any disturbance or downtime.

High-quality data as a basis for the operation of systems in a smart city

Yes, thanks to IT systems and a free data flow and instant access to information, failures that took days to fix can now be solved in a few hours. Although IT solutions are indispensable for this to happen, they cannot work without data – the key to a functioning IT system is data and not just any data, but high-quality data. This crucial element is often underestimated. In our enthusiasm for the modern we want to move directly to the stage of implementation of high-tech solutions, but in the meantime, often low-quality data or even the total lack thereof can make it difficult or even stop us such implementations.

Most of the time, especially in sectors such as Energy and Telecommunications, companies hold thousands of square meters of information in their network in the form of paper archives or they totally lack up-to-date information on certain elements of the network. It is estimated that 40-50% of all networks in Europe still have no form of digital inventory. Even though the data has already been digitised, it is often stored in different systems and in different, incompatible formats.

The process of digitising, unifying or collecting the data to be introduced into the systems can be one of the most difficult, time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks in the entire digital transformation process. Fortunately, here technology can lend a helping hand. One of these tools that can help speed up the digitization process is GlobIQ – one of Globema's products created specifically to help companies in the utilities and telecommunications sector digitize their assets.

A closer look at GlobIQ's data collection and support process

So, let's take a closer look at the process of collecting and digitizing data for a network and how GlobIQ can help in each of the cases. We will consider 3 different scenarios:

1. Lack of data

Here we have to start from nothing – we have no information about a network – neither on paper nor in digital format. In this case, field workers need to go out into the field and make an inventory of a particular element of a network, write down their parameters, and then put them into a system. This is a tedious manual work, which is also very prone to human error in both the process of collecting and in the process of loading data into a system. These possible errors can slow down the process of collecting data even further, as they need to be identified and corrected, which usually means collecting part of the data again.
GlobIQ accelerates this part of the process thanks to a support-application that helps to collect data in as few steps as possible. Data is collected, digitized and stored immediately thanks to a mobile application..

For power grids specifically, we have the application Low-Voltage Topology
AIt uses Artificial Intelligence to recognize the voice and images. The application supports data collection and verification / updating of data for energy structures, such as: medium voltage and low voltage stations, electrical cabinets, etc. Thanks to image recognition technology, the application can automatically read the parameters of the grid elements in the images taken in the field. The application is voice-operated, so it is extremely useful in situations where manually entering information on a mobile device turns out to be difficult.

2. Data stored on paper

Another case is when we already have a certain amount of data collected - this applies especially to companies that have been operating in the market for decades and that were present long before the digital age, as is often the case with large state-owned companies in the telco or utilities sector. They usually store a large amount of information about their networks, but it is difficult to access employees and inaccessible to modern systems. To be of any use, these documents must be scanned and the information extracted and organized.

GlobIQ uses the LocDoc support application, using AI algorithms, to read and organize scanned documents and extract defined categories of data. LocDoc can extract and classify data on average more than 10 times faster than a human performing the same work.

3. Incompatible data formats

The third case scenario - we have access to a kind of digitized data, but it is stored in different formats - incompatible with each other and incompatible with the system that is supposed to use them. This issue can also be addressed with the help of GlobIQ, which is supported by the FME platform – a popular tool for data aggregation and processing. Thanks to automated scripts, FME can unify the collected data formats much faster and more accurately than could be done manually. The EMF supports more than 450 different data formats and all known geographic coordinate systems.

Let's see where we are after these steps.

• We collected data that we didn't have previously.
• We digitized the data we had on paper or
• We have converted and merged data into different formats to be compatible with each other and with the system in which they will be used.

Only at this point, when we have all the data collected and organized, can we begin to actually think about the implementation of any solutions that we usually associate with smart cities.

As we hope we have been able to show, high-quality data, and therefore the stage of data collection and classification, are essential for the functioning of intelligent systems and cities. They cannot work, much less at a high level, without data. However, this element is often ignored. We assume that we have data, meanwhile, this is often far from true.

That said, data collection, as important as it is, is only the first step towards a smart city. The data collected still needs to be processed in order to carry out certain processes. And this requires a totally different set of IT solutions and tools that help, for example, to view and manage digitized assets. You can learn more about them during the presentation "Smart cities need smart tools. How to digitize and manage geospatial assets in an intelligent way" that will take place on November 2, at 11:15 a.m., as part of the "Smart Geospatial Solutions" section of the Smart Cities of Romania Conference 2021.