Digital city

The term Digital Community or Digital City (Smart Community, information city and e-city are also used) refers to a connected community that combines broadband communications infrastructure; flexible, service-oriented computing infrastructure based on open industry standards; and innovative services to meet the needs of governments and their employees, citizens and businesses. The geographical dimension (space) of digital communities vary: they can be extended from a city district up to a multi-million metropolis.

While wireless infrastructure is a key element of Digital City infrastructure, it is only a first step. The Digital City may require hard-wired broadband infrastructure, and it is much more than just the network. A Digital City provides interoperable, Internet-based government services that enable ubiquitous connectivity to transform key government processes, both internally across departments and employees and externally to citizens and businesses. Digital City services are accessible through wireless mobile devices and are enabled by services oriented enterprise architecture including Web services, the Extensible Markup Language (XML), and mobilized software applications.

Research on digital cities is conducted by many organizations, including the MIT Smart Cities Lab; the World Foundation for Smart Communities; URENIO research unit and the Lab for Global Information Networks, Unicamp.

See also

• Intelligent city
• Smart city

References

• Ishida T., Isbister K. (Eds.), 2000, Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives, Springer-Verlag.
• Tanabe M., Besselaar P., Ishida T. (Eds.), 2002, Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches, Springer-Verlag.
• Cook Diane, Sajal Das, 2005, Smart Environments: Technologies, Protocols, and Applications, Wiley-Interscience.
• Besselaar P. Koizumi S. (Eds.), 2005, Digital Cities III: Information Technologies for Social Capital - Cross-cultural Perspectives, Springer-Verlag.
• Communities and Technologies 2005, Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005, Springer.