Pravah.io: An open source data exchange for Smart Cities
Future smart cities in India would be powered by data emerging from various infrastructure nodes. The current state of infrastructure which is disintegrated and disconnected from each other does not allow the development of smart interconnected and integrated smart city applications. Many stakeholders in smart cities do not have a platform to share data which discourages collaboration among them and reduces productivity. Open data from smart cities could also be used by private entities to build innovative and productive applications for the citizens, governments, and corporates and hence boosting economy and ease of living.
Apart from the lack of accessibility, we have no standards which define how we share data in smart cities. Take a case of traffic congestion data across a city. There are no global or Indian standards for the same.
India also lacks a framework to share high-velocity or real-time data which plays a crucial role in any smart city application where decisions have to be taken in almost real-time. The amount of time it takes for the data to reach the consumer from its origin should be within a second in many smart city apps. This is absolutely needed in time-critical applications like emergency respondents, traffic management, public transport accessibility, etc.
Introducing Pravah
Pravah: pravah.io
Github: github.com/pravahio/go-mesh
We are building an open source data exchange platform for smart cities with a focus on high velocity or real-time data.
Through this, we envision to connect different stakeholders in a smart city like data producers and consumers to each other to enable a data economy, improve collaboration and simplify access to real-time data. The goals are to maintain high data quality, low latency, well-defined data sharing standards and easy deployability across different platforms. This would enable anyone to build integrated mobility applications from multi-modal route planning to inter-connected traffic signals managing traffic using AI.
We propose to develop a framework to define data sharing standards for existing and new datasets emerging from smart cities using Blockchain technology. This would help data producers to easily publish data and consumers to integrate and adapt to this data with negligible cost.
The entire platform is built on the peer-to-peer networking stack which brings transparency and accessibility to all stakeholders. This also helps the platform to scale and host countrywide data network.
How are we different:
Open Source: We propose to open source our platform to build trust and innovation with open collaboration.
Compatible across various platforms: Our platform is compatible to publish or consume data directly from a microprocessor board like RaspberryPi to a mobile device and even a server graded system. This would enable ease of adaptability for differentiated use cases.
Build for Indian Smart Cities: We plan to uniquely design our product for Indian smart cities with a focus on usability, privacy, and scale.
Distributed and Decentralised: Unlike traditional model where data is available in a centralised server we are building a decentralised and distributed data exchange which would be easy to scale, respect privacy, improves availability and transparency.
Privacy Aware: The design of our platform ensures that no private data flows through our system. This is ensured by designing protocols that respect the privacy of an individual consuming or publishing data on the platform.
Open Innovation: By making our platform open source we encourage collaboration and innovation with other stakeholders in the smart cities. This would help anyone from an individual to governments and corporates to come together and grow this platform according to the needs of the users.