Cities on their way to becoming smart cities want to invest in future-proof, interoperable solutions. As many of the currently available solutions are proprietary, the TALQ Consortium decided to develop the Smart City Protocol to unify multifarious smart city requirements including device commissioning, configuration, control, command, monitoring, scheduled programs as well as data collection. Thanks to this software protocol, cities will be able to choose from device networking solutions available from multiple vendors and control them all through a single Central Management Software (CMS) instance.

The TALQ Smart City Protocol offers several benefits: first of all a flexible data model that is applicable to a wide range of sectors and many different uses cases, such as outdoor lighting control, waste collection, parking space detection, environmental data collection, energy management and more. that include a set of agreed configuration, operational and metering attributes and events. These functions

a RESTful approach makes it easy to integrate in both existing CMS and Gateways. To enable configuration, control, command and monitoring by any TALQ-compliant CMS, the Specification provides secure HTTP REST GET, PUT, POST, PATCH and DELETE requests and associated JSON data payloads.

Furthermore TALQ provides a comprehensive certification program and associated test tools to prove interoperability. This is not only invaluable for vendors during their implementation process, but gives end-customers, such as cities, the assurance that the selected solutions are truly compatible.

While the detailed TALQ Specification is available only for TALQ member companies, the White Paper can be found in the public domain of the TALQ website.