Wi-City: living, deciding and planning using mobiles in Intelligent Cities

The current GPS navigational systems are mainly developed with a proprietary approach based on incomplete information and behave as general purpose information systems based on average traffic data. On the contrary, effective location based services should be based on real time traffic information and should take into account all the databases available at urban scale to help decision making and planning of the mobile users. This paper aims at illustrating how a prototypical distributed information system, called Wi-City, may help people in living, deciding and planning in cities where collective and cooperative intelligence systems will be more and more adopted by the citizens. Indeed, Wi-City is an ubiquitous information system available over an open/interoperable platform to support mobile user decisions taking advantage from real time data and information available on the different databases at urban scale, including the ones stored on the user mobiles.