8 European Cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Helsinki, Istanbul, Lamia, Lisbon, Manchester and Rome) have been working together to release opendata in a coordinated way to energise their local developer communities and provide a European wide market for new applications and services. CitySDK (“City Service Development Kit”) is creating a toolkit for the development of digital services within cities.

The toolkit comprises of open and interoperable digital service interfaces as well as processes, guidelines and usability standards. CitySDK enables a more efficient utilisation of the expertise and know-how of developer communities to be applied in city service development. Whether cities are looking to improve citizen’s “issue reporting” through our use of the “Open 311” protocol, integrate mobility and other data via Linked Data platform, or encourage applications to be de veloped to show tourism and events, the CitySDK has a number of dedicated components that work across the 8 cities, and are being adopted elsewhere.

This 3 year project ends in October 2014, and the next six months provide cities with opportunities to adopt the toolkit, and developers a chance to work with it – as we create a sustainable series of tools for smart cities to continue following the project’s end. These versatile tools can kickstart service development in cities and provide reliable interfaces for new integrated applications and visualisations.