Smart City Ontologies: Improving the effectiveness of smart city applications

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicos Komninos ◽  
Charalampos Bratsas ◽  
Christina Kakderi ◽  
Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos

This paper addresses the problem of low impact of smart city applications observed in the fields of energy and transport, which constitute high-priority domains for the development of smart cities. However, these are not the only fields where the impact of smart cities has been limited. The paper provides an explanation for the low impact of various individual applications of smart cities and discusses ways of improving their effectiveness. We argue that the impact of applications depends primarily on their ontology, and secondarily on smart technology and programming features. Consequently, we start by creating an overall ontology for the smart city, defining the building blocks of this ontology with respect to the most cited definitions of smart cities, and structuring this ontology with the Protégé 5.0 editor, defining entities, class hierarchy, object properties, and data type properties. We then analyze how the ontologies of a sample of smart city applications fit into the overall Smart City Ontology, the consistency between digital spaces, knowledge processes, city domains targeted by the applications, and the types of innovation that determine their impact. In conclusion, we underline the relationships between innovation and ontology, and discuss how we can improve the effectiveness of smart city applications, combining expert and user-driven ontology design with the integration and or-chestration of applications over platforms and larger city entities such as neighborhoods, districts, clusters, and sectors of city activities.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Barba-Sánchez ◽  
Luis Orozco-Barbosa ◽  
Enrique Arias-Antúnez

Smart City initiatives across the globe have spurred increasing demand for high-skilled workers. The digital transformation, one of the main building blocks of the Smart City movement, is calling for a workforce prepared to develop novel business processes. Problem-solving, critical and analytical thinking are now the essential skills being looked at by employees. The development of the so-called STEM curriculum, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics is being given a lot of attention by educational boards in response to preparing young generations for the Smart City work market. Based on the IMD Smart City Index, PISA, and World Bank reports, we develop a model for assessing the impact of the IT secondary school capacities on Smart-City business developments. The model reveals the relationship between the technological capacity of the secondary-school, and the business activity of a Smart City. Moreover, the study shows the existence of a positive relationship between the IT capacity of secondary schools and the resulting entrepreneurial activity of the city. Our results are of interest to decision-makers and stakeholders responsible for designing educational policies and agents involved in the digital transformation and development of Smart Cities initiatives.


Author(s):  
Nicos Komninos ◽  
Anastasia Panori ◽  
Christina Kakderi

The paper is a follow-up of a previous investigation and effort to develop the ontology of the smart city (Komninos, N., Bratsas, C., Kakderi, C., and Tsarchopoulos, P. "Smart city ontologies: Improving the effectiveness of smart city applications". Journal of Smart Cities, vol. 1(1), 1-17. https://www.komninos.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-Smart-City-Ontologies-Published.pdf). Since the publication of this article in 2015, research and literature on smart cities have evolved significantly, as have the technologies for digital spaces and applications that support city functions. These developments are reflected in the present form of the smart city ontology 2.0 we propose. It depicts the building blocks of the smart city ontology (technologies, structure, function, planning), and the object properties and data properties that connect structural blocks and classes. The aim of the SCO 2.0 is to provide a better understanding and description of the smart/intelligent city landscape; identify the main components and processes, the terms used to describe them, their definition and meaning; clarify key processes related to the integration of the different dimensions of the smart city, mainly the physical, social, and digital dimensions. The paper is accompanied by an owl file, developing the ontology through the editor Protégé.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 5595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Lavalle ◽  
Miguel A. Teruel ◽  
Alejandro Maté ◽  
Juan Trujillo

Fostering sustainability is paramount for Smart Cities development. Lately, Smart Cities are benefiting from the rising of Big Data coming from IoT devices, leading to improvements on monitoring and prevention. However, monitoring and prevention processes require visualization techniques as a key component. Indeed, in order to prevent possible hazards (such as fires, leaks, etc.) and optimize their resources, Smart Cities require adequate visualizations that provide insights to decision makers. Nevertheless, visualization of Big Data has always been a challenging issue, especially when such data are originated in real-time. This problem becomes even bigger in Smart City environments since we have to deal with many different groups of users and multiple heterogeneous data sources. Without a proper visualization methodology, complex dashboards including data from different nature are difficult to understand. In order to tackle this issue, we propose a methodology based on visualization techniques for Big Data, aimed at improving the evidence-gathering process by assisting users in the decision making in the context of Smart Cities. Moreover, in order to assess the impact of our proposal, a case study based on service calls for a fire department is presented. In this sense, our findings will be applied to data coming from citizen calls. Thus, the results of this work will contribute to the optimization of resources, namely fire extinguishing battalions, helping to improve their effectiveness and, as a result, the sustainability of a Smart City, operating better with less resources. Finally, in order to evaluate the impact of our proposal, we have performed an experiment, with non-expert users in data visualization.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Helen Dian Fridayani ◽  
Rifaid Rifaid

Sustainable city is a city that designed by considering the impact on the environment, inhabited by population with a number and behavior that requires minimal support for energy, water and food from the outside, and produces less CO2, gas, air and water pollution. Moreover the national government envisions Indonesia2030which shallimplement the smart city towards sustainable development.Especially in Sleman Regency, the government is committed to make Sleman Regency as a Smart Regency in 2021. It could be shown in the vision of Sleman Regency which is The realization of a more prosperous Sleman community, Independent, Cultured and Integratede-governmentsystem to the Smart Regency in 2021”. This paper would like to analyze how the Sleman Regency implement the Smart city concept, and does the smart city concept can achive the sustainability city. The research uses the qualitative approach with in-deepth interview in examining the data, also the literature review. The result in this study reveals the following: firstly, from 2016-2019 Sleman regency has several applications to support the smart city implementation such as One Data of UMKM, Home Creative Sleman, Lapor Sleman app, Sleman Smart app, online tax app, e-patient, sleman emergency service, and Sleman smart room. Second, there are many elements in smart cities that are very important for smart government, smart life, smart economy, smart society, and smart environment. However, in supporting to support the realization of smart cities, not all aspects must be implemented properly to achieve a managed city, components related to smart environment cannot be implemented properly in Sleman Regency. There are still many problems regarding environmental problems such as the development of the construction of hotels and apartments that do not heed the environment, incrasing the populations, the limitations of green open space.


Author(s):  
MAKSIM D. PUSHKAREV ◽  
◽  
DMITRY A. PROKOFIEV ◽  

Smart city technologies make the functioning of urban infrastructure more efficient, and the lives of citizens more comfortable and safe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they were very popular, and this could not but affect the energy efficiency of high-tech megacities around the world. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on smart cities, and also offers a solution to the problem of energy efficiency of smart cities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 9463
Author(s):  
Dominika Šulyová ◽  
Josef Vodák

One of the main motives for creating this article was to explore the importance of cultural aspects in building smart city approaches. The aim of this article was to obtain answers to three research questions, the answers to which made it possible to identify the elements of multiculturalism that affect the development of smart cities, to find out how multiculturalism affects smart cities and how to manage diversity. The ambition was to create and organize the most important findings into a comprehensive framework. To achieve this goal, secondary analysis methods were used by examining the literature and case studies of best practices from Europe, North America, and Asia. The choice of case studies was conditioned by the placement of smart cities in four global indices (smart city index, Arcadis, IESE and global power index), the existence of a multicultural strategy and elements of successful diversity management, including positive effects and possible limitations. In addition, methods of analysis, comparison and summarization were used. Effective diversity management acts as an accelerator of the sustainable development of smart cities. The results of the analysis of the case studies serve as a basis for recommendations and the creation of a proposed general model, whose task is to simplify the adoption of intelligent concepts, which creates space for the specification of local or cultural conditions of the country. Testing the model in practice is the subject of the following research activities of the authors.


Author(s):  
Naureen Naqvi ◽  
Sabih Ur Rehman ◽  
Zahidul Islam

Recent technological advancements have given rise to the concept of hyper-connected smart cities being adopted around the world. These cities aspire to achieve better outcomes for citizens by improving the quality of service delivery, information sharing, and creating a sustainable environment. A smart city comprises of a network of interconnected devices also known as IoT (Internet of Things), which captures data and transmits it to a platform for analysis. This data covers a variety of information produced in large volumes also known as Big Data. From data capture to processing and storage, there are several stages where a breach in security and privacy could result in catastrophic impacts. Presently there is a gap in the centralization of knowledge to implement smart city services with a secure architecture. To bridge this gap, we present a framework that highlights challenges within the smart city applications and synthesizes the techniques feasible to solve them. Additionally, we analyze the impact of a potential breach on smart city applications and state-of-the-art architectures available. Furthermore, we identify the stakeholders who may have an interest in learning about the relationships between the significant aspects of a smart city. We demonstrate these relationships through force-directed network diagrams. They will help raise the awareness amongst the stakeholders for planning the development of a smart city. To complement our framework, we designed web-based interactive resources that are available from http://ausdigitech.com/smartcity/.


2019 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 05011
Author(s):  
M. Afanasiev ◽  
M. Lysenkova

“Smart city” is a new model of territorial development, taking into account the growing importance of information, innovation and human capital. One of the main elements of the “smart city” is a developed system of higher education. The aim of this work was to study the impact of higher education on "smart" and innovative cities. The objectives of this work were to obtain quantitative characteristics of the impact of the University on the smart city. Approach to solving this problem was to build indicators based on indicators that characterize the quality of life, and ratings to compare cities on their basis. The hypothesis of the study is that the higher education system has a positive impact on the development of smart and innovative cities. A theoretically justified method of constructing an indicator of a certain direction of socio-economic development is a component analysis of indicators characterizing this direction. As a result, the rankings of Russian and foreign cities based on the characteristics of quality of life, which prove that education is a key indicator of the development of "smart" and innovative cities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Shirowzhan ◽  
Willie Tan ◽  
Samad M. E. Sepasgozar

Smart technologies are advancing, and smart cities can be made smarter by increasing the connectivity and interactions of humans, the environment, and smart devices. This paper discusses selective technologies that can potentially contribute to developing an intelligent environment and smarter cities. While the connectivity and efficiency of smart cities is important, the analysis of the impact of construction development and large projects in the city is crucial to decision and policy makers, before the project is approved. This raises the question of assessing the impact of a new infrastructure project on the community prior to its commencement—what type of technologies can potentially be used for creating a virtual representation of the city? How can a smart city be improved by utilizing these technologies? There are a wide range of technologies and applications available but understanding their function, interoperability, and compatibility with the community requires more discussion around system designs and architecture. These questions can be the basis of developing an agenda for further investigations. In particular, the need for advanced tools such as mobile scanners, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Geospatial Augmented Reality apps, Light Detection, and Ranging in smart cities is discussed. In line with smart city technology development, this Special Issue includes eight accepted articles covering trending topics, which are briefly reviewed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 647-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert J. Meijer ◽  
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia ◽  
Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar

There are three issues that are crucial to advancing our academic understanding of smart cities: (1) contextual conditions, (2) governance models, and (3) the assessment of public value. A brief review of recent literature and the analysis of the included papers provide support for the assumption that cities cannot simply copy good practices but must develop approaches that fit their own situation ( contingency) and concord with their own organization in terms of broader strategies, human resource policies, information policies, and so on ( configuration). A variety of insights into the mechanisms and building blocks of smart city practices are presented, and issues for further research are identified.


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