Page 42 - GCN, June/july 2017

case study
SMART CITIES
Louisiana town taps IoT for air quality data
City officials are working with industry and university partners to build an interactive smart-city platform in Lafayette
BAY SARA FRIEDMAN
coalition in Lafayette, La., is
starting to take advantage
of the city’s gigabit fiber and utility networks to provide near-real-
time information on air quality. Lafayette was awarded a $40,000 grant through the Environmental Pro- tection Agency’s Smart City Air Chal- lenge last year to deploy air quality sensors around the city and make the resulting data publicly accessible. Part- ners on the project include the Lafay- ette Consolidated Government (LCG), the University of Louisiana at Lafayette
and CGI Federal.
“We are deploying 300 air quality
sensors around the city and parish that are going to be measuring ozone and particulate matter,” CGI Federal Vice
President William LaBar told GCN. “The sensors that we are buying come from different vendors so we are going to be able aggregate a lot of data and compare it across different types of sen- sors in terms of quality.”
The project is one step in providing an internet-of-things environment to spur more community innovations. It expands on the work of Lafayette Util- ity Services, which built a fiber ring around the community in 1998 and by 2010 had extended fiber access to each home in the community.
CGI is using an application program- ming interface from the Open Geospa- tial Consortium called SensorThings to connect devices, data and applications via the web.
Lafayette officials will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to host and man- age the sensor data the community and university will use.
“SensorThings provides a powerful, open-source way to do bidirectional communication with your IoT data management platform and the actual sensors that are deployed in the field,” LaBar said. “We are building an addi- tional set of open-source components that we are going to contribute back to the standard.”
The university’s participation in the project involves creating the platforms, or boxes, that contain the sensors and making sure they will be able weather the elements.
“Our goal was to put out a whole
38 GCN JUNE/JULY 2017 • GCN.COM
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