Digital city Kyoto

The concept of digital cities is to build an arena in which people in regional communities can interact and share knowledge , experiences, and mutual interests. Digital cities integrate urban information (both achievable and real time) and create public spaces in the Inter-net for people living/visiting the cities. Digital cities are being developed all over the world [7]. Why do regional information spaces attract people given this era of globalization? The Internet has triggered global businesses, but at the same time enables us to create rich information spaces for everyday life. While the Internet makes research and businesses global, life is inherently local. Business requires homogeneity to allow global competition, while life is heterogeneous reflecting the different cultural backgrounds. Business applications require standard protocols to overcome differences, but we do not need any standard for our life. If there are differences, we need to support cross-cultural communications. The rapid advance of Internet technologies makes any prediction rather suspect. Digital cities will change together with the computer and communication technologies. No digital city can remain at its current status. Given this qualification, we visit several digital cities around the world and then review their goals, architecture, and technologies for a better understanding of their current status and future. We first turn to digital cities in the U.S. When we perform a " digital city " search, we find many instances created by America Online. AOL provides locally focused online network services for several hundred cities and the number is growing. Each AOL digital city delivers locally relevant news, community resources, entertainment, and commerce. Unlike general search engines aimed at retrieving information around the world, digital cities focus on local information. Besides those information services , AOL provides local advertising opportunities for vertical markets including auto, real estate, employment, and health. AOL digital cities are very homogeneous as a result of pursuing economic efficiency. In Europe, however, more than 100 local authorities started different digital cities in the last eight years. The topics include telematic applications, car-free cities, and so on. The European Digital Cities Conference started in 1994 to discuss a wide variety of topics [9]. Digital City Amsterdam, for example, was built eight year ago [12] as a platform for various community networks and thus focuses particularly on social interaction among citizens. This digital city was first created for communication between the municipal council and citizens. All communication was presented …