Evaluation system: Evaluation of smart city shareable framework and its applications in China

Abstract

Smart city evaluation is a critical component in smart city construction and plays an important role in guiding and promoting smart development of cities. Currently, existing research and applications of smart city evaluation are still in the exploration stage. They mainly focus on evaluation of one single aspect, use indicators with distinct regional characteristics and poor extensibility, and cannot be well-integrated with common and shareable smart city frameworks; these limitations have led to biased evaluation results. Based on a common and shareable smart city framework, this paper proposes a well-integrated, universal, strongly practical, and highly extensible evaluation system. Then, using the above-mentioned evaluation system, 17 smart cities in China are assessed. This application demonstrates that the evaluation system plays an important guiding role for better understanding the overall smart city platform construction situation in China, performing horizontal comparisons and establishing benchmarks among smart cities. Comparative analyses of indicators demonstrate that future smart city construction in China should pay more attention to novel innovations, the construction of dynamic information resources and spatiotemporal big data.