About Us
Who we are and what we do
Since the industrial revolution, people have been generating more and more data. It is now estimated that over 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are created every day.
The issue is that the overwhelming preponderance of this information is not used or analyzed. We at Snap4City believe that this data has value and that the only way to realize its potential is by providing a framework to help organizations exploit its value.
Story
The story of Snap4City is rooted in the local territory: the specific need of administrators to identify the best tools available to improve the services offered to their communities.
2013
In 2013, the City of Florence expressed the need for a single data aggregator that would unify all the data in a single model, something to which they had access until then through third-party platforms.
The challenge was taken up by the DISIT Lab, which operated within the university of the Tuscan city, through an autonomous intervention implemented in close contact with the city of Florence. This collaborative effort led to the definition of the Km4City (Knowledge Model For The City) ontology, with the first version of the data aggregator (https://www.km4city.org).
Starting from these first bases, the research development has taken new directions intending to strengthen the platform, expanding its features and characteristics to meet the different needs identified thanks to constant and continuous interaction with the territory.
2015
2015 saw the launch of the RESOLUTE action, which focuses on the management of critical events and the resilience of essential structures of cities. In the same year, Si-Mobility concentrated on mobility and transport and expanded the database to cover all of Tuscany.
2016
In 2016, with the flagship project REPLICATE, we developed the infrastructure for the data management of the Smart City Control Room for the City of Florence.
2017
In 2017, the first activities in Industry 4.0 began, which led to the integration of all those protocols and specific features of the industrial world.
2018
In 2017, Select4Cities PCP was launched by Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Antwerp, which led to a wide-reaching modernization and harmonization of the whole solution. This development led to the name change in Snap4City to highlight the simplification that the new platform would bring in the innovation processes of cities: “Be smart in a snap.”
2020
Finally, Snap4city was the winner of the Select4Cities PCP and gained more and more visibility at an international level.
2022
Important collaborations in the smart city and industry sectors supported the grow of the solutions in terms of interoperability, flexibility, stability and funzionalities. Actually the platform is providing smart services in more than 40 areas, not only in Europe, thanks also to the support of our partners…
In a world increasingly interconnected, that first desire of the city of Florence in 2013, has allowed for creating a platform that has fully developed internationally.
Snap4City is today a framework that meets the needs of smart cities and those of industries and business activities engaged in the digital transformation process that is a prerequisite to meet present and future challenges.
Skills
The people who work on a project are essential for its success.
This is also true for the individuals who help Snap4City with its activities.
Since the industrial revolution, people have been generating more and more data. It is now estimated that over 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are created every day.
The issue is that the overwhelming preponderance of this information is not used or analyzed. We at Snap4City believe that this data has value and that the only way to realize its potential is by providing a framework to help organizations exploit its value.
Snap4City’s core team consists of DISIT Lab staff from the University of Florence: about 15 people who work daily on:
- developing new features
- fixing bugs
- developing the business
- coordinating with partners and companies for what concerns research and innovation.
Added to this is the work dedicated to maintaining activities on a 24/7 basis, without interruptions.
The DISIT lab has been active since 1994 and is one of the most active ICT laboratories of the University of Florence. It has expertise in the following areas:
- big data
- artificial intelligence
- natural language processing distributed systems
- formal models
- metrics definition and assessment.
The DISIT lab has been active since 1994 and is one of the most active ICT laboratories of the University of Florence. It has expertise in the following areas:
- Smart City integrated solutions
- Data Mining and understanding (Open Data ingestion, quality improvement, data fusion, reconciliation)
- Open Data (Linked Open Data, RDF stores visual tools, link discovering, enrichment)
- Data analytics ed Explainable Data Analytics (statistics, clustering, logistic and holistic regression, machine learning, indexing and search, similarity distance)
- Semantic computing: (ontology/knowledge modeling, reasoning, deduction, recognition, disambiguation, prediction, inference high performance distributed systems)
- Grid and parallel computing
- RDF store: (indexing, high performance, parallel querying)
- Content and data protection (IPR modeling, conditional access, digital rights management, protected content players)
We are always at the forefront of new solutions, paying attention to the continuous evolution of technology in this period of epochal digital transformation. Our team is the best guarantee to have available what is probably the most dynamic product of its kind on the market.
