Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos

Smart City Ontologies: Improving the effectiveness of smart city applications

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 Protege 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.

ImproveMyCity: an open source platform for direct citizen-government communication

ImproveMyCity is an open source platform that enables residents to directly report to their public administration local issues about their neighborhood such as discarded trash bins, faulty street lights, broken tiles on sidewalks, illegal advertising boards, etc. The reported issues are automatically transmitted to the appropriate office in public administration so as to schedule their settlement. Reporting is feasible both through a web- and a smartphone-based front-end that adopt a map-based visualization, which makes reporting a user-friendly and intriguing process. The management and routing of incoming issues is performed through a back-end infrastructure that serves as an integrated management system with easy to use interfaces. Apart from reporting a new issue, both front-ends allow the citizens to add comments or vote on existing issues, which adds a social dimension on the collected content. Finally, the platform makes also provision for informing the citizens about the progress status of the reported issue and in this way facilitate the establishment of a two-way dialogue between the citizen and public administration.

Enhancing sustainable urban development through smart city applications

Purpose This paper investigates the potential contribution of smart city approaches and tools to sustainable urban development in the environment domain. Recent research has highlighted the need to explore the relation of smart and sustainable cities more systematically, focusing on practical applications that could enable a deeper understanding of the included domains, typologies and design concepts, and this paper aims to address this research gap. At the same time, it tries to identify whether these applications could contribute to the “zero vision” strategy, an extremely ambitious challenge within the field of smart cities. Design/methodology/approach This objective is pursued through an in-depth investigation of available open source and proprietary smart city applications related to environmental sustainability in urban environments. A total of 32 applications were detected through the Intelligent/Smart Cities Open Source (ICOS) community, a meta-repository for smart cities solutions. The applications are analyzed comparatively regarding (i) the environmental issue addressed, (ii) the associated mitigation strategies, (iii) the included innovation mechanism, (iv) the role of information and communication technologies and (v) the overall outcome. Findings The findings suggest that the smart and sustainable city landscape is extremely fragmented both on the policy and the technical levels. There is a host of unexplored opportunities toward smart sustainable development, many of which are still unknown. Similar findings are reached for all categories of environmental challenges in cities. Research limitations pertain to the analysis of a relatively small number of applications. The results can be used to inform policy making toward becoming more proactive and impactful both locally and globally. Given that smart city application market niches are also identified, they are also of special interest to developers, user communities and digital entrepreneurs. Originality/value The value added by this paper is two-fold. At the theoretical level, it offers a neat conceptual bridge between smart and sustainable cities debate. At the practical level, it identifies under-researched and under-exploited fields of smart city applications that could be opportunities to attain the “zero vision” objective.

Smart cities and cloud computing: lessons from the STORM CLOUDS experiment

Since the emergence of cloud computing paradigm, there has been an increasing interest on the adoption of cloud computing from municipalities and city governments towards their effort to address complex urban problems. This paper explores the significant role that cloud computing can play in helping cities on their way to become smart. We focus on the STORM CLOUDS paradigm as a solution for municipalities everywhere in order to (i) deploy a portfolio of smart cities applications related to governance, economy and quality of life on a single cloud-based platform and (ii) use the platform and its accompanied tools to migrate their existing applications to the cloud environment. Besides the conclusions from the STORM experience, the paper closes with a number of research trends and future challenges that are expected to define the adoption of cloud computing from municipalities and city governments in the following years

Smart cities and cloud computing: Introduction to the special issue

The special issue “Smart Cities and Cloud Compu-ting” of the Journal of Smart Cities focuses on smart city solutions that are deployed over various types of cloud environment and discuss challenges and solu-tions related to the use of cloud computing, and main-ly the migration of smart city services to the Cloud.

Smart Cities on the Cloud

The emergence of the cloud computing paradigm has found fertile ground in the smart cities discipline, especially with regards to its benefits both in terms of big data storage and analytic capabilities and in terms of smart city service provision. Over the past years we have noticed an abundance of publications on cloud computing; from government reports to corporate studies, all show the significant benefits of cloud computing and the opportunities presented by the migration of public/municipal services to the cloud. Despite the availability of information, the landscape with regard to cloud computing adoption is still quite blurry. This chapter aims to provide methodological guidance to public/city authorities on the use of and the actual steps towards taking up the cloud computing paradigm. More specifically, it offers a simple methodology in the form of a roadmap with the main roadblocks one can expect to encounter when migrating public services to the cloud, along with a set of recommendations that facilitate decision-making in various stages of this process. We also argue that cloud computing adoption should not be an isolated action of an organization (city authority/governmental agency), but part of a wider strategic model based on open innovation practices (the use of open source technologies for the cloud platform and applications, the use of open data, the adoption of user engagement methodologies etc.) as well as the use of innovative business models.