Dear Colleagues,

The increasing role of innovations in information and communication technologies have made cities smarter to run their systems more efficiently and effectively. Our physical and digital worlds are slowly merging. Cities are running with different types of inter-connected systems intended for the better management of urban and natural resources of cities to improve the quality of life of their residents, giving rise to the so-called digital twin cities. The term digital twin has been used as an example of revolution and is considered fundamental to transformation. These new services promise to be the answer to many societal problems. However, the rapid shift also brings many challenges. The heterogeneity of domains, systems, data, and the relationships between them in a city requires information expressed in a flexible and extensible way while promoting interoperability between systems and applications in order to make a more resilient and sustainable city. So far, the rather uncontrolled development of technology by many sectors led to organizational silos, with a broad range of different standards representing these silos. Smart city architectures must consider many requirements and stakeholders related to it. The ontology-based modeling of the built environment is promising for successfully integrating disparate knowledge silos and has gained significant attraction in industry and academia.

In response to these challenges, this Special Issue will focus on how ontology catalogs can be more effectively used to design and develop smart city applications. This issue will explore, but not be limited to, the following topics:

• Linked data and the semantic web technology applications in cities
• Smart buildings and asset management
• Autonomous vehicles and smart transportation system
• Circularity and repurpose materials
• Infrastructure asset management
• Ontology development in smart cities
• Ontology evaluation in the domain of smart cities
• Automated ontology matching
• Case studies and implementations of smart cities
• Towards a semantic construction digital twin

Dr. Dujuan Yang
Prof. Dr. Dezhi Li
Dr. Yunfeng Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Smart Cities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Linked data
• Semantic web technology
• Digital twins
• Transportation information modeling
• Building information modeling
• Construction and maintenance
• Infrastructure
• Resilience
• Asset management