Smart Cities and the Necessity of Opening of the Data in the Czech Republic as an Example of Cee Country

Abstract

Transparency and openness should be the basic principle of modern public administration. Many cities want to become smart cities, so they develop smart city strategies and realise specific smart city projects. However, only a few of the Czech cities are actually successful in this area. This paper studies the problems of the open data approaches in cities’ practice. The public administration collects and stores data representing a smart city’s critical element and one of the smart governance’s essential tools toward modern public administration. The study aims to analyse the situation of open data and smart city measures in the Czech Republic and demonstrate the obvious separation of smart city implementation, data utilisation and smart governance in cities’ practice. The Czech Republic is one of the CEE countries that could benefit from more comprehensive smart cities measurement applications because some of its regions lag in digitalisation development. The opening of the data and the utilisation of them could be the first step for the cities or regions to implement advanced methods and technologies to become smart city. The only cities with successfully implemented smart city measures are the ones that are also relatively successful in open data publishing.