IoT Platforms and Technologies Driving Spatial Planning and Analytics

The continuous evolution of internet of things technologies is constantly evolving the concept of smart cities as well as the surrounding environments. From pervasive sensors through computational nodes at the edge of the network to the cloud and final user applications, the data flow chain makes available to the user a very large and heterogeneous amount of data. IoT platforms are at the core of this chain, providing seamless access to data independently from the hardware devices and making possible the interoperability with other data sources (e.g., GIS, SIM, etc.). Despite the availability of IoT platform solutions either commercial and open-source, research is still very active to design and implement flexible, easy-to-use, and efficient web-service-oriented software infrastructures. This chapter will review the current IoT platform infrastructures making also reference to state-of-the-art solutions in literature and proposed in recent research projects. The chapter will outline the main challenges and directions about future platforms, putting them in the context of realistic case studies.