Interdisciplinary urban GIS for smart cities: advancements and opportunities

As urbanization process has been and will be happening in an unprecedented scale worldwide, strong requirements from academic research and practical fields for smart management and intelligent planning of cities are pressing to handle increasing demands of infrastructure and potential risks of inhabitants’ agglomeration in disaster management. Geospatial data and geographic information systems (GISs) are essential components for building smart cities in a basic way that maps the physical world into virtual environment as a referencing framework. On higher level, GIS has been becoming very important in smart cities on different sectors. In the digital city era, digital maps and geospatial databases have long been integrated in workflows in land management, urban planning and transportation in government. People have anticipated GIS to be more powerful not only as an archival and data management tool but also as spatial models for supporting decision-making in intelligent cities. Successful applications have been developed in private and public organizations by using GIS as a platform for data integration, a system for geospatial analysis and collection of models for visualization and decision-making. Location-based services on smart mobile devices in ubiquitous telecommunication networks are now an indispensable function that expands knowledge of the nature and connections among people. On data side, crowd-sourcing, real-time urban sensing and true 3-dimensional (3D) models and visualization have provided more advantages of GIS to final users and at the same time challenged current available solutions and technologies of data handling, visualization and human–computer interaction. On the technological side, Web 2.0 participatory applications provide the framework and environment for GIS to closer link to photogrammetry and computer vision, which empowers smart devices more capabilities. How to manage big geo-tagged data volumes collected by numerous sensors and implement professional GIS functions in a cloud computing environment are urgent questions to facilitate smart cities management. This paper reviews advancements of GIS in the management of cities as information systems to facilitate urban modelling and decision-making, as referencing basis to integrate social network media, and concludes that an interdisciplinary urban GIS is needed to support development of smart cities. We take Singapore as a case of GIS pervasive applications, which has strategically made a master plan of national information infrastructure and has been implementing geospatial collaboration environments for public and private sectors.