What (Smart) Data Visualizations Can Offer to Smart City Science

Understanding the complexity and dynamicity of cities, as well as predicting and leading their evolutions, are topics of interest of new scientific disciplines such as smart city and city science. The development of better urban theories and simulation models could be fostered by both the availability of suitable datasets illustrating several urban perspectives and approaches being able to actively explore them in order to reveal patterns, relationships and meaningful data facets hidden there. In this context, data visualization – namely information visualization and visual analytics – is more than a promising research field to get new insights into data evidence. Its holistic approach couples pictorial representations, human factors and data analysis in order to enforce viewers' cognitive process of learning. In this paper we aim at providing an overview of the data visualization problems by reviewing current efforts into urban visualization, especially when considering two critical city issues: urban planning and energy efficiency. In particular, our objective is two-fold: presenting the most common approaches to data visualization disciplines and contextualizing them into the most advanced European initiatives and projects. In parallel, we introduce some hints about the most promising research areas and challenges that the domain experts could tackle in the very next future