Unleashing the Power of Participatory IoT with Blockchains for Increased Safety and Situation Awareness of Smart Cities

IoT has emerged as an unprecedented paradigm with great potential for changing how people interact, think and live. It is making existing Internet services feasible in ways that were previously impossible, as well as paving the way for new situation- awareness applications suitable for smart cities, such as realtime video surveillance, traffic control, and emergency management. These applications will typically rely on large numbers of IoT devices to collect and collaboratively process streamed data to enable real-time decision making. In this article, we introduce the concept of Semantic Virtual Space (SVS), an abstraction for virtualized cloud-enabled IoT infrastructure that is commensurate with the goals and needs of these emerging smart city applications, and propose and discuss scalable architectures and mechanisms that enable and automate the deployment and management of multiple SVS instances on top of the cloud-enabled IoT infrastructure.