Existing challenges of the cities have proven that in order to smartly manage the physical infrastructure, a well-designed communication system between different actors, parties and organizations as well as services to the citizens are required (DEGBELO et al. 2015). This also applies to the district scale. Observing districts that are passing through the smart transition of their services and structures highlights the complexity of these systems. District is a system of systems, which are deeply interconnected with each other. In most cases, changes in one system or service will affect the others. Hence, it is essential to look at such complex and distributed systems from different angles.
There are two approaches, one is a distributed or de-centralised approach and another one is a centralised and monolithic approach. Although the centralised approach allows pumping of all the various information from different sources into a single repository, the limitations with this approach such as the unwillingness of different source providers for releasing their data into a central repository, difficulty in management of semantics of various data, etc. makes the centralised approach impractical and will rule it out from the discussion. Hence, the distributed approach meets better the needs of the districts.
The strategy of SDDI is to adapt the concept of a distributed system, consisting of heterogeneous components, which are connected by standardized interfaces. Naturally working in such a complex, distributed system means coping with different aspects of heterogeneity, i.e. different types of data (structured and unstructured data), data models, data formats, applications, stakeholders, software systems and so on.
The SDDI has a modular structure and defines an organisational and technical framework consisting of actors, applications, registry, sensors, an urban analytics toolkit, and a virtual district model as it is shown in the figure above.
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The SDDI architecture is explained in the page SDDI Architecture.