Urban Computing and Smart Cities Applications for the Knowledge Society

During the last years, we faced a tremendous development of mobile sensing applications powered by innovative technologies related to ubiquitous and pervasive computing, volunteered geographic information, crowdsourcing and social networks. Nowadays, we are living in the next digitally enriched generation of social media in which communication and interaction for user-generated content is mainly focused on improving the sustainability of smart cities. Thus, urban computing is defined as the technology for acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban spaces, such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and human, for tackling the major issues that cities face. Moreover, this technology is seeking ways to reduce inefficiencies and to be more agile in responding to citizens' needs in order to create smart cities. In this position paper, we address the content to describe the urban applications and the challenges for open research problems that are presented in the big cities.