The Automation of the Softer Side of Smart City: a Socio-Semantic Roadmap

We present a roadmap for guiding public officials on establishing platforms for citizen empowerment in the smart city. The proposed roadmap is not a technical architecture. Rather, a set of paradigms, guidelines and references to advanced technology approaches that can support building a technical architecture. We start from the perspective that the smart city architecture is not a venue for services, but a domain of innovation. We advocate encouraging citizen science to co-create new solutions—in contrast to engaging them to inform them or to evaluate solutions developed by professionals. We advocate giving equal attention to structured and unstructured data analysis. We also encourage the adoption of adaptable data orchestration tools to help navigate and organize the complexity of city data. Finally, we provide an outlook on the future trends (such as Blockchain and cognitive computing) in urban systems decision making.