ISO/IEC 30182:2017 describes, and gives guidance on, a smart city concept model (SCCM) that can provide the basis of interoperability between component systems of a smart city, by aligning the ontologies in use across different sectors. It includes:

- concepts (e.g. ORGANIZATION, PLACE, COMMUNITY, ITEM, METRIC, SERVICE, RESOURCE); and

- relationships between concepts (e.g. ORGANIZATION has RESOURCEs, EVENT at a PLACE).

The SCCM does not replace existing models where they exist, but, by mapping from a local model to a parent model, questions can be asked about data in a new and joined-up way.

ISO/IEC 30182:2017 is aimed at organizations that provide services to communities in cities, and manage the resulting data, as well as decision-makers and policy developers in cities.1)

The SCCM is relevant wherever many organizations provide services to many communities within a place.

It does not cover the data standards that are relevant to each concept in the SCCM and does not attempt to list or recommend the sources of identifiers and categorizations that cities map to the SCCM.

The SCCM has been devised to communicate the meaning of data. It does not attempt to provide concepts to describe the metadata of a dataset, for example, validity and provenance of data.

It covers semantic interoperability, that is, defining the meaning of data, particularly from many sources. It does not cover other barriers to interoperability, some of which are described at 3.2.