A current trend in crisis-laden Europe is de-industrialisation. The European Union has launched ambitious policies and proposed a new research and innovation framework programme, Horizon 2020, to counter this trend and to foster innovation in manufacturing. The paper highlights the key issues related to this upcoming programme. R&D and innovation efforts, however, need to be underpinned by smar...

Smart cities are emerging fast and they introduce new practices and services which highly impact policy making and planning, while they co-exist with urban facilities. It is now needed to understand the smart city’s contribution in the overall urban planning and vice versa, to recognize urban planning offerings to a smart city context. This chapter highlights and measures smart city and urban p...

During the last decade, many European digital cities applied ICT to improve the local public sphere, reinforce local democracy, support local communities and increase social participation. Different policies of a variety of stakeholders led to a wide variation of designs and functionality, content, main actors, aims and philosophy, organization, and use and users. To build a useful and sustaina...

To provide effective support for education and training of U-City manpower, it is necessary to analyze its demand and develop the appropriate education course. Development of education courses requires reviewing the cases of other industries, understanding the demands of each educatees, developing the education courses in detail, and making the standard teaching materials. Therefore, this study...

Access to high quality and updated data is crucial to assess and contextualize city state of affairs. The City Data Pipeline uses diverse Open Data sources to integrate statistical information about cities. The resulting incomplete dataset is not directly usable for data analysis. We exploit data from a geographic information system, namely OpenStreetMap, to obtain new indicators for cities wit...

RDF stores may be used to set up knowledge bases integrating heterogeneous information for web and mobile applications to use the data for new advanced services to citizens and city administrators, thus exploiting inferential capabilities, temporal and spatial reasoning, and text indexing. In this paper, the needs and constraints for RDF stores to be used for smart cities services, together wit...