Using clouds for smart city applications

The increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices along with the use of technologies like GPS, Wifi networks, RFID, etc., allows for the collections of large amounts of movement data. This amount of information can be analyzed to extract descriptive and predictive models that can be profitable exploited to improve urban life. This paper presents an integrated Cloud based framework for efficiently managing and analyzing socioenvironmental data in the urban context of cities. As case study, we introduce a parallel approach for discovering patterns and rules from trajectory data. Experimental evaluation shows that the trajectory pattern mining process can take advantage from a scalable execution environment offered by a Cloud architecture. © 2013 IEEE.