: Smart city systems increasingly depend on data analytics and visualization to support informed and timely decision making in complex urban environments. However, existing middleware solutions predominantly focus on data acquisition and communication, while analytical processing and visualization are typically delegated to external applications, resulting in increased development complexity, reduced reusability, and fragmented system architectures. This study presents analytics and visualization-centric middleware named “Service-Oriented Middleware for Smart City Applications” (SOMSCA), in which these capabilities are embedded directly within the middleware layer. SOMSCA adopts a service-oriented approach, exposing analytics and visualization functionalities as reusable platform services, and incorporates a data-type-oriented visualization strategy along with a template-assisted dash-boarding mechanism to enable dynamic and flexible application development. To validate the proposed approach, a prototype implementation is developed using React, FastAPI, MySQL, and TimescaleDB and evaluated using air-quality data collected from the London Air Quality Network, comprising more than one million observations across multiple pollutants and monitoring locations. The implementation supports real-time, historical, and aggregated analytical services together with dynamic dashboard generation. The results demonstrate the practical feasibility of middleware-integrated analytics and visualization through reusable service creation, flexible dashboard configuration, and interactive environmental monitoring capabilities. These findings highlight the potential of middleware-level intelligence to simplify application development and support data-driven decision making in smart city environment.
Zulfiqar Ali, A. Mahmood, S. Khatoon et al.· Computers, Materials & C...· 0 citations
Geotechnical hazards such as landslides, subsidence, slope instability, and infrastructure deformation threaten rapidly urbanising and environmentally stressed regions worldwide, intensifying the need for scalable and intelligent monitoring systems capable of continuously observing complex Earth surface dynamics. Although multisensor remote sensing fusion has substantially expanded the observational capabilities of modern geotechnical monitoring through the integration of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), optical imagery, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), and environmental data, existing fusion pipelines remain subject to several well-documented constraints, including weak semantic alignment, limited temporal reasoning, and poor transferability across heterogeneous environmental conditions. This review synthesises the emerging transition from conventional sensor-centric fusion toward intelligent geospatial monitoring architectures centred on deep multimodal representation learning, transformer-based temporal reasoning, self-supervised learning, and geospatial foundation models. Particular emphasis is placed on how recent architectures are designed to better preserve coherent spatial, temporal, and contextual environmental relationships within unified latent representation spaces rather than through downstream handcrafted integration. The review further examines the growing role of multimodal transformers, masked autoencoders, contrastive learning, and large-scale geospatial foundation models in enabling scalable environmental reasoning, adaptive multimodal learning, and transferable geospatial intelligence across sensing modalities and geographic domains. Finally, remaining challenges involving uncertainty, explainability, computational scalability, and environmental generalisation are discussed alongside future research directions involving continual learning, physics-aware artificial intelligence, and autonomous geotechnical monitoring systems. Together, the reviewed literature suggests that multimodal Earth observation is evolving from passive environmental sensing toward adaptive geospatial intelligence systems capable of scalable hazard reasoning and autonomous environmental understanding.
