THE SMART CITY INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT & MONITORING

The smart city infrastructure is the introductory step for establishing the overall smart city framework and architecture. Very few smart cities are recently established across the world. Some examples are: Dubai, Malta, Kochi (India), Singapore. The scope of these cities is mainly limited to construct a technology park converting the industrial real estate to state of the art information technology using the evolution in the telecom and IP networks including insignificant asset management automation system. The development background is to create an operational platform that would manage the power consumption and operational resources in order to reduce the overall running operational cost. This paper will debate the smart infrastructure development framework and the surveying positional accuracy of locating the assets as a base of the smart city development architecture integrated with all the facilities and systems related to the smart city framework. The paper will discuss also the main advantages of the proposed architecture including the quantifiable and non quantifiable benefits.Smart Infrastructure, GIS, Smart City, Geopsatial application, Infrastructure Development, Infrastructure Monitoring.

Ontology-based Classification and Analysis of non- emergency Smart-city Events

Several challenges are faced by citizens of urban centers while dealing with day-to-day events, and the absence of a centralised reporting mechanism makes event-reporting and redressal a daunting task. With the push on information technology to adapt to the needs of smart-cities and integrate urban civic services, the use of Open311 architecture presents an interesting solution. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses an existing Open311 ontology to classify and report non-emergency city-events, as well as to guide the citizen to the points of redressal. The use of linked open data and the semantic model serves to provide contextual meaning and make vast amounts of content hyper-connected and easily-searchable. Such a one-size-fits-all model also ensures reusability and effective visualisation and analysis of data across several cities. By integrating urban services across various civic bodies, the proposed approach provides a single endpoint to the citizen, which is imperative for smooth functioning of smart cities

THE ROLE OF COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE AND DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN THE SMARTER CITIES

The transition from the traditional city to the smart city is made by supported efforts regarding the achievement of a more steady, more efficient, more responsible city, through convergent strategies that deal with Smart Transportation Systems, Energy and Utilities Management, Water Management, Smart Public Safety, Healthcare Systems, Environmental Management, Educational Systems, Telecommunications (ITC Support),etc. and Positive Thinking. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) meets the customers’ needs and the administration, the management of data, information, knowledge and decisions through Collaborative Systems and Decision Support Systems have a major impact both at the level of the smart city and the level of subsystems/services, and the information technology within smart cities becomes a major direction of research in the field of ITC.Smart City, Collaborative Systems, Decision Support Systems (DSS), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Portal technology

Informational Urbanism. A Conceptual Framework of Smart Cities

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of information-related city research. Informational urbanism is an interdisciplinary endeavor incorporating on the one side computer science and information science as well as on the other side urban studies, city planning, architecture, city economics, and city sociology. In this article, we present both, a conceptual framework for research on smart cities as well as results from our empirical studies on smart cities all over the world. The framework consists of seven building blocks, namely information and knowledge related infrastructures, economy, politics (e-governance) and administration (e-government), spaces (spaces of flows and spaces of places), location factors, the people’s information behavior, and problem areas. \

Concepts for Modeling Smart Cities

The rapid increase and adoption of new Information Technologies (IT) in Smart Cities make the provision of public services more efficient. However, various municipalities and cities deal with challenges to transform and digitize city services. Smart Cities have a high degree of complexity where offered city services must respond to the concerns and goals of multiple stakeholders. These city services must also involve diverse data sources, multi-domain applications, and heterogeneous systems and technologies. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an instrument to deal with complexity in both private and public organizations. The paper defines the concepts for modeling Smart Cities in ArchiMate, guided by a design-oriented research approach. Particularly, the focus of this paper is on the concepts for modeling city services and underlying information systems which are added to the EA metamodel. The metamodel is demonstrated in a real-world case and validated by Smart City domain experts. The findings suggest that these concepts are essential to achieve the Smart City strategy (e.g., city goals and objectives), as well as to meet the needs of different city stakeholders. Furthermore, an extension mechanism allows addressing the alignment of business and IT in complex environments such as Smart Cities, by adjusting EA metamodels and notations. This can help cities to design, visualize, and communicate architecture decisions when managing the transformation and digitalization of public services

IMPROVING THE DEPENDABILITY OF DESTINATION RECOMMENDATIONS USING INFORMATION ON SOCIAL ASPECTS

Prior knowledge of the social aspects of prospective destinations can be very influential in making travel destination decisions, especially in instances where social concerns do exist about specific destinations. In this paper, we describe the implementation of an ontology-enabled Hybrid Destination Recommender System (HDRS) that leverages an ontological description of five specific social attributes of major Nigerian cities, and hybrid architecture of content-based and case-based filtering techniques to generate personalised top-n destination recommendations. An empirical usability test was conducted on the system, which revealed that the dependability of recommendations from Destination Recommender Systems (DRS) could be improved if the semantic representation of social attributes information of destinations is made a factor in the destination recommendation process

The fractal urban coherence in biourbanism: the factual elements of urban fabric

This article is available online and will be inserted in also printed format in the Journal in October 2013.During the last few decades, modern urban fabric lost some very important elements, only because urban design and planning turned out to be stylistic aerial views or new landscapes of iconic technological landmarks. Biourbanism attempts to re-establish lost values and balance, not only in urban fabric, but also in reinforcing human-oriented design principles in either micro or macro scale. Biourbanism operates as a catalyst of theories and practices in both architecture and urban design to guarantee high standards in services, which are currently fundamental to the survival of communities worldwide. Human life in cities emerges during connectivity via geometrical continuity of grids and fractals, via path connectivity among highly active nodes, via exchange/movement of people and, finally via exchange of information (networks). In most human activities taking place in central areas of cities, people often feel excluded from design processes in the built environment. This paper aims at exploring the reasons for which, fractal cities, which have being conceived as symmetries and patterns, can have scientifically proven and beneficial impact on human fitness of body and mind; research has found that, brain traumas caused by visual agnosia become evident when patterns disappear from either 2D or 3D emergences in architectural and urban design.ADT Fund