Smart Government in Smart Cities

A special issue of Informatics (ISSN 2227-9709).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 July 2017) | Viewed by 47807

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Informatics welcomes submissions on the topic of smart technologies and their applications to public administration in Smart Cities. In the early 21st century, the use of information and communication technologies (usually ICTs) and data has been considered as the means to solve the city’s economic, social and environmental challenges and it has been thought to rationalize and improve government because it has the potential to transform governance and organizational issues. Under this framework, the Smart Cities concept has gained a lot of attention, but studies about Smart Cities have been focused mainly on business-led urban development, on the social inclusion agenda, on the role of creative industries in urban growth, on the importance of social capital in urban development and on the urban sustainability. This special issue should contribute to the literature by filling the existing void and expanding knowledge in the field of the implementation of smart technologies into public administration in different fields, such as the improvement of transparency, efficiency (in public services, in sustainability, in mobility into a municipality, etc.), governance in a smart city, as well as the study of organizational issues arisen by these implementations. Therefore, I encourage authors to submit their original research articles, work in progress, surveys, reviews, and viewpoint articles in this field. This Special Issue welcomes applications, theories, models, and frameworks—whether conceptual, analytical, prescriptive, predictive, design-related, or otherwise—that are concerned with (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Smart technologies implemented in public sector entities for improving transparency and interoperability (open data, disclosure of information, etc.).
  • Smart technologies implemented in public sector entities for improving efficiency (in the delivery of public sector services, in smart mobility, in smart environment, and in smart living).
  • Smart technologies implemented in public sector entities for improving governance of the city.
  • Organizational issues in the implementation of smart technologies in public sector entities.
  • Comparative studies on smart technologies implemented in public sector entities.
  • Empirical analysis on smart technologies and their best fit for public administrations in making Smart Cities to be successful.

Prof. Dr. Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Informatics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

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Keywords

  • Smart Governance
  • Smart Cities
  • Smart technologies
  • Smart Governments

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

26 pages, 4735 KiB  
Article
An Adaptable System to Support Provenance Management for the Public Policy-Making Process in Smart Cities
by Barkha Javed, Zaheer Khan and Richard McClatchey
Informatics 2018, 5(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics5010003 - 08 Jan 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 8698
Abstract
Government policies aim to address public issues and problems and therefore play a pivotal role in people’s lives. The creation of public policies, however, is complex given the perspective of large and diverse stakeholders’ involvement, considerable human participation, lengthy processes, complex task specification [...] Read more.
Government policies aim to address public issues and problems and therefore play a pivotal role in people’s lives. The creation of public policies, however, is complex given the perspective of large and diverse stakeholders’ involvement, considerable human participation, lengthy processes, complex task specification and the non-deterministic nature of the process. The inherent complexities of the policy process impart challenges for designing a computing system that assists in supporting and automating the business process pertaining to policy setup, which also raises concerns for setting up a tracking service in the policy-making environment. A tracking service informs how decisions have been taken during policy creation and can provide useful and intrinsic information regarding the policy process. At present, there exists no computing system that assists in tracking the complete process that has been employed for policy creation. To design such a system, it is important to consider the policy environment challenges; for this a novel network and goal based approach has been framed and is covered in detail in this paper. Furthermore, smart governance objectives that include stakeholders’ participation and citizens’ involvement have been considered. Thus, the proposed approach has been devised by considering smart governance principles and the knowledge environment of policy making where tasks are largely dependent on policy makers’ decisions and on individual policy objectives. Our approach reckons the human dimension for deciding and defining autonomous process activities at run time. Furthermore, with the network-based approach, so-called provenance data tracking is employed which enables the capture of policy process. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart Government in Smart Cities)
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594 KiB  
Article
Data Governance in the Sustainable Smart City
by Krassimira Paskaleva, James Evans, Christopher Martin, Trond Linjordet, Dujuan Yang and Andrew Karvonen
Informatics 2017, 4(4), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics4040041 - 15 Nov 2017
Cited by 66 | Viewed by 18521
Abstract
The wisdom of ‘smart’ development increasingly shapes urban sustainability in Europe and beyond. Yet, the ‘smart city’ paradigm has been critiqued for favouring technological solutions and business interests over social inclusion and urban innovation. Despite the rhetoric of ‘citizen-centred approaches’ and ‘user-generated data’, [...] Read more.
The wisdom of ‘smart’ development increasingly shapes urban sustainability in Europe and beyond. Yet, the ‘smart city’ paradigm has been critiqued for favouring technological solutions and business interests over social inclusion and urban innovation. Despite the rhetoric of ‘citizen-centred approaches’ and ‘user-generated data’, the level of stakeholder engagement and public empowerment is still in question. It is unclear how smart city initiatives are developing common visions according to the principles of sustainable urban development. This paper examines how data governance in particular is framed in the new smart city agenda that is focused on sustainability. The challenges and opportunities of data governance in sustainability-driven smart city initiatives are articulated within a conceptual Framework on Sustainable Smart City Data Governance. Drawing on three cases from European countries and a stakeholder survey, the paper shows how governance of data can underpin urban smart and sustainable development solutions. The paper presents insights and lessons from this multi-case study, and discusses risks, challenges, and future research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart Government in Smart Cities)
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4954 KiB  
Article
In Search of Smartness: The EU e-Justice Challenge
by Marco Velicogna
Informatics 2017, 4(4), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics4040038 - 08 Nov 2017
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 8809
Abstract
At the EU level, an increasing number of resources are being invested in an attempt to provide better public services through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). While new tools are being designed and implemented, a shift from ‘traditional’ technologies that [...] Read more.
At the EU level, an increasing number of resources are being invested in an attempt to provide better public services through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). While new tools are being designed and implemented, a shift from ‘traditional’ technologies that must be used to provide services to more interactive ‘smart’ technologies is beginning to take place. At the same time, an adequate understanding of the implications of this shift is still missing. This paper focuses on the EU e-Justice experience with the ‘API-for-Justice’ project, which investigates the challenges of opening up the European e-Justice Digital Service Infrastructure to external service providers by means of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In particular, the exploration of potential services that can be provided by third parties through APIs for Justice shows the potential for a radical redesign of the justice service provision, where, for example, justice services are not requested by the party but are proposed or initiated by smart components of the infrastructure on the basis of inputs from the environment. In this perspective, smart technology research and, in particular, Brenner (2007)’s discussion on law and smart technology help to uncover the still unclear dynamics of change that characterize one of the key pillars of modern society: justice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart Government in Smart Cities)
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1273 KiB  
Article
Reinforcement Learning for Predictive Analytics in Smart Cities
by Kostas Kolomvatsos and Christos Anagnostopoulos
Informatics 2017, 4(3), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics4030016 - 24 Jun 2017
Cited by 28 | Viewed by 11013
Abstract
The digitization of our lives cause a shift in the data production as well as in the required data management. Numerous nodes are capable of producing huge volumes of data in our everyday activities. Sensors, personal smart devices as well as the Internet [...] Read more.
The digitization of our lives cause a shift in the data production as well as in the required data management. Numerous nodes are capable of producing huge volumes of data in our everyday activities. Sensors, personal smart devices as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm lead to a vast infrastructure that covers all the aspects of activities in modern societies. In the most of the cases, the critical issue for public authorities (usually, local, like municipalities) is the efficient management of data towards the support of novel services. The reason is that analytics provided on top of the collected data could help in the delivery of new applications that will facilitate citizens’ lives. However, the provision of analytics demands intelligent techniques for the underlying data management. The most known technique is the separation of huge volumes of data into a number of parts and their parallel management to limit the required time for the delivery of analytics. Afterwards, analytics requests in the form of queries could be realized and derive the necessary knowledge for supporting intelligent applications. In this paper, we define the concept of a Query Controller ( Q C ) that receives queries for analytics and assigns each of them to a processor placed in front of each data partition. We discuss an intelligent process for query assignments that adopts Machine Learning (ML). We adopt two learning schemes, i.e., Reinforcement Learning (RL) and clustering. We report on the comparison of the two schemes and elaborate on their combination. Our aim is to provide an efficient framework to support the decision making of the QC that should swiftly select the appropriate processor for each query. We provide mathematical formulations for the discussed problem and present simulation results. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation, we reveal the advantages of the proposed models and describe the outcomes results while comparing them with a deterministic framework. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart Government in Smart Cities)
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