Big data in Smart Cities

Khan, Zaheer; Peters-Anders, Jan

Abstract

City governance is a complex phenomenon and requires new combinations of top-down and bottom-up ICT-enabled governance methodologies to efficiently manage cities. Cities are a major source of urban, socio-economic and environmental data which provide basis for developing and testing Smart City solutions. The notion of Smart Cities has gained a lot of momentum in the past decade. City administrators have realised the potential for ICT to collect and process city data and generate new intelligence concerning the functioning of a city that aims to secure effectiveness and efficiency in city planning, decision making and governance. Without urban data and use of ICT, this intelligence either cannot be generated or requires considerable resources e.g. financial, human, etc.

Recent publications in smart cities domain emphasise better use of urban data by developing innovative domain specific applications which can provide new information or knowledge. This new knowledge can be used by city administrations, citizens and private sector organisations to effectively and efficiently manage their daily activities and/or business processes, as well as the decision-making processes that underpin the governance of the city. The city data is generated from various thematic domains (e.g. transport, land-use, energy, economic, climate, etc. however there is little debate on the holistic view of cross-thematic city data which requires Big Data management approaches and high performance computing paradigms like cloud computing.

In this chapter, we provide a holistic view of Smart City Big Data by reviewing different Smart City projects and applications (UrbanAPI, DECUMANUS, Smarticipate), describing cross-thematic domain Big Data and data management challenges cities face and for which they require appropriate solutions. We also list various datasets available in cities and share lessons learned from the above mentioned projects.

• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Encylopedia of Big Data Technologies
• ISBN: 9783319775241
• Keywords: Smart Cities, big data, analytics, visualisation
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/854765
• Publisher URL: https://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319775241