The vision of a smart city is underpinned by its ability to collect, manage, and use data. However, data access remains a fundamental challenge across city agencies, public institutions, and community stakeholders. This project is championing a paradigm shift in data sharing by implementing a new data access framework that allows users to share access to data in-situ instead of sending copies of data around. This project builds on the new data access paradigm to deploy a city Data Access Network (City-DAN) to support city managers get timely access to important data for fast decision and response. City-DAN is piloted first in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and then scaled to other ASEAN cities. This activity is in response to NSF Dear Colleague Letter Supporting Transition of Research into Cities through the US ASEAN ((Association of Southeast Asian Nations Cities) Smart Cities Partnership in collaboration with NSF and the US State Department. The research team (University of Virginia) is working closely with stakeholders in Ho Chi Minh City including city managers, departments, and community organizers as well as Vietnam National University – International University to transition technology into practice.

The proposed distributed, peer-to-peer data access framework represents an ambitious vision of the next generation data ecosystem. This project establishes a foundational data platform to underpin smart cities by addressing issues of data integrity, provenance, control, and timely access. This project takes advantage of the unique deployment opportunity to pursue a vibrant research agenda on grid computing. Specific research areas include advanced cyber infrastructure, cybersecurity, networking, and persistent identifiers. This project will especially focus on identity and access management (IAM) in the context of unreliable infrastructure and weak level-of-assurance (identify proofing) baselines. The project will examine new approaches for enhancing reliability while balancing with transparency and QoS. Lessons learned also can be adopted to advance the smart and connected community research community in the US and other countries.