Whilst it is commonly stated that the Smart City concept requires access to real-time data from sensors of all types, providing open and interoperable access to these is still a significant challenge.

This project, funded by the Technology Strategy Board under the Internet of Things Interoperability Ecosystem Demonstrator call, is delivering a solution to this problem: a Hub platform that provides open interoperable access to a large number of IoT and data assets managed by the Westminster City Council and EdF Energy.

The objective is to have application developers being able to retrieve the IoT resources using a set of known interfaces, but also to have application developers to become part of the Hub interoperability ecosystem by providing, through a set of open interfaces, value-added services for transforming the raw data sets into data and information sets that can be used more easily by other developers.

University of Bristol, together with IBM, have developed a flexible architecture for dynamic service chain formation and a market-based model for service trading in the Hub, thus having the IoT-Bay Hub operating as a real ecosystem, maintained and grown by its users (IoT application developers) and not in a centralised managed way. This was demonstrated in a Urban City Hackathon organised by DataScience London on 15-16th February 2014 in Hub Westminster, London.