Dr Iadh Ounis, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, made a series of comments about goals and objectives: “The SMART project will be built upon an open-source search engine technology known as Terrier we have been developing at the University since 2004, and we’re pleased to be involved in this innovative research initiative.”
He added that, “The SMART engine will be able to answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors that can contribute to the query, then synthesizing results stemming from distributed sources in an intelligent way... SMART builds upon the existing concept of ‘smart cities’, physical spaces which are covered in an array of intelligent sensors which communicate with each other and can be searched for information. The search results sourced from these smart cities can be reused across multiple applications, making the system more effective.
As a bit of an FYI, it was also noted that this is not some pie-in-the-sky futurist project. The expectation is that SMART will be ready for testing in a real city by 2014.”
While this is a European project, it is interesting that with the exception of IBM most of the big players in the smart city space have not signed up to participate yet. Indeed, notable by their absence are communications service providers who one would have thought would like to be in on the ground floor along with Google, Microsoft and now Apple (News
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