The circumstances for a smart city concept differ from city to city. Likewise, the potentials in the cities are different. The smart city is not a concrete goal, but rather a rough vision of a next-generation city. Cities should become more efficient, more digital, greener, more social and closer to their citizens. Everything that makes up a city is included under this consideration.
More social & more digital
The decentralized self-sovereign identity (SSI for short) sees the individual at the center of every use case. In the context of the smart city, this corresponds to the citizen of the city.
SSI empowers the individual – or the citizen – to manage his or her digital identity in a self-sovereign and secure manner. The digital identity is not managed centrally by the city, but decentrally by the citizen himself. For this purpose, the citizen has a corresponding wallet for the smartphone.
In this wallet, the citizen can store corresponding certificates/data and forward them to third parties if required. In the smart city, the city would therefore provide a wallet and make the corresponding certificates available to the citizen.
The application for a parking permit can be used as an example here. Various data are required here, such as ID card, certificate of residence and license plate number. The citizen enters this data in the wallet or receives this data directly from various city departments as a certificate. When applying for a parking permit, the citizen transfers the corresponding certificate data in bundled form. If the requirements for obtaining a permit are met, this decision is also transferred to the Wallet as a digital certificate.
The digital citizen is data sovereign
In some areas, therefore, smart city can mean connecting citizens digitally with the city. In this context, it is crucial to digitize the processes and to meet the requirements of data protection, especially data minimization. It is also important to strengthen data sovereignty in general.
In the future, verification via certificates will reduce the overall volume of data and serve as a medium for identification that is needed on a daily basis.
The city can therefore use SSI technology to make citizens data sovereign and digital.
However, the decisive factor for the successful implementation of the digital identity of the citizen in a city is the embedding of the idea in different use cases. The added value for the citizen and the city is given when the certificates from the City APP are often used.
myEGO SSI technology is therefore one component of an overall concept for the smart city.
NAS Smart Platform and myEGO: A Partnership for the Smart City of the Future
The closed partnership of NAS and myEGO is therefore the ideal combination of NAS Smart City platform and myEGO SSI Wallet & Technology.
NAS – Smart City Platform
Cities and regions have set out to develop the smart cities/region of the future. Many digital solutions are currently emerging in the individual sectors (vertical areas such as mobility, administration, etc.). However, these are still being operated and developed autonomously and independently of the other sectors of the city. On the one hand, this leads to high efforts and costs in IT operations and, on the other hand, citizens have to use a multitude of applications to move digitally through their city/region. As the number of applications increases, how can we combine and link these sectors in the future?
This is exactly what NAS Smart Platforms GmbH has developed its smart city platform “bundle regional” for and is already in use in the first cities.
Citizens can experience their city through a front-end with integrated digital ID (which can be done through myEGO SSI technology) and payment function and use all services across sectors, delivered through our open and modular platform.
Three areas of expertise are combined to form a holistic platform:
- Seamless integration/ orchestration of third-party systems
- Seemless customer journey, so that citizens can use and pay for all services with a single log-in (single sign-on) and a digital customer account. The LogIn solution from NAS is also linked with the SSI solution from myEGO and thus provides SSO on a decentralized identity.
- Value Added Services that enable the operator (e.g. the city/region) of the platform to deal with smart data in an innovative way.
The existing platform construction kit enables cities to orchestrate their Smart City quickly and easily. NAS Smart Platforms GmbH sees itself as a partner that wants to support and accompany the cities/regions in their projects with its know-how from the development and operation of smart city platforms.