Citizen-centric data services for smarter cities

Abstract

Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic "smart city in a box" solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens' active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city's data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities' data ecosystem.

Are Smart-City Projects Citizen-Centered?

“…It was time to deploy in cities the projects that technology companies had prepared to solve the problems of a population that was not asked what those problems were. The holistic solutions was an "intelligent city in a box" (Aguilera et al 2017). To this was added the need for every public manager to justify their actions and to find an external person in charge to blame for making decisions about something.…”

Smart cities survey: Technologies, application domains and challenges for the cities of the future

“…In public services, as stated in Hollands, 69 Nam and Pardo 161 and Su et al, 10 the introduction of technology within this services enhances them towards SC. For instance, Emaldi et al 162 introduce the co-creation of urban apps based on the collaboration of different stakeholders (citizens, private companies, research institutes and public administrations), whereas Aguilera et al 163 create an open platform for the generation of user-oriented Internet services making use of the data generated by users' smartphones and from the different cities' open data platforms. Therefore, users act as prosumers, producers and consumers of the data.…”

Achieving Neuroplasticity in Artificial Neural Networks through Smart Cities

“…One of the salient features of the smart city concept is its reliance on technologies such as Internet of things (IoT) [9,10], big data [11,12], blockchain [13][14][15], and artificial intelligence (AI) [16,17], which transformed the design, planning, and management of urban life. These technologies allowed for speedy, quality, efficient, and real-time processes due to their ability to allow for massive data gathering and analysis [18,19]. They allowed communication between different components of the city within the network; hence, services and activities run seamlessly with little negative impact on the environment, the economy, and the available resources [20].…”