PoliVisu is a Research and Innovation project designed to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using big data. The aim is to enhance an open set of digital tools to leverage data to help public sector decision-making become more democratic by (a) experimenting with different policy options through impact visualisation and (b) using the resulting visualisations to engage and harness the collective intelligence of policy stakeholders for collaborative solution development. Working with three cities to address societal problems linked to smart mobility and urban planning, the intention is to enable public administrations to respond to urban challenges by enriching the policy making process with opportunities for policy experimentation at three different steps of the policy cycle (policy design, policy implementation, and policy evaluation). Experimentation of policy options will enable the cities to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking to develop transformative solutions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings opportunities for creating new services and products, reducing costs for societies, increasing the service level for the citizens in a number of areas, and changing how services are sold and consumed. Despite these opportunities, current information system architectures create obstacles that must be addressed for leveraging the full potential of IoT. One of the most critical obstacles are the ‘vertical silos’ that shape today’s IoT because they constitute a serious impediment to the creation of cross-domain, cross-platform and cross-organisational applications and services. Those silos also hamper developers from producing new added value across multiple platforms due to the lack of interoperability and openness. bIoTope provides the necessary Standardized Open APIs for enabling horizontal interoperability between silos. Such horizontal interoperability makes it possible to develop Systems of Systems where cross-domain information from platforms, devices and other information sources can be accessed when and as needed. bIoTope-enabled Systems can seamlessly exploit all available information, which makes them smart in the sense that they can take or propose the most appropriate actions depending on the current User’s or Object’s Context/Situation, and even learn from experience. bIoTope capabilities lay the foundation for open innovation ecosystems where companies can innovate both by the creation of new software components for IoT ecosystems, as well as create new Platforms for Connected Smart Objects with minimal investment. Large-scale pilots implemented in smart cities will provide both social, technical and business proofs-of-concept for such IoT ecosystems. This is feasible because the bIoTope consortium combines unique IoT experience, commercial solution providers and end-users, thus ensuring the high quality and efficiency of the results and implementations.