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The holy grail of smart cities is an integrated, sustainable approach to improve the efficiency of the city's operations and the quality of life of citizens. At the heart of this vision is the citizen, who is the primary beneficiary of smart city initiatives, either directly or indirectly. Despite the recent surge of research and smart cities initiatives in practice, there are still a number of challenges to overcome in realizing this vision. This position paper points out six citizen-related challenges: the engagement of citizens, the improvement of citizens' data literacy, the pairing of quantitative and qualitative data, the need for open standards, the development of personal services, and the development of persuasive interfaces. The article furthermore advocates the use of methods and techniques from GIScience to tackle these challenges, and presents the concept of an Open City Toolkit as a way of transferring insights and solutions from GIScience to smart cities. publishersversion published

Many countries currently maintain a national data catalog, which provides access to the available datasets – sometimes via an Application Programming Interface (API). These APIs play a crucial role in realizing the benefits of open data as they are the means by which data is discovered and accessed by applications that make use of it. This article proposes semantic APIs as a way of improving access to open data. A semantic API helps to retrieve datasets according to their type (e.g., sensor, climate, finance), and facilitates reasoning about and learning from data. The article examines categories of open datasets from 40 European open data catalogs to gather some insights into types of datasets which should be considered while building semantic APIs for open government data. The results show that the probability of inter-country agreement between open data catalogs is less than 30 percent, and that few categories stand out as candidates for a transnational semantic API. They stress the need for coordination - at the local, regional, and national level - between data providers of Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union through the GEO-C project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement Number 642332, http://www.geoc. eu/). Carlos Granell has been funded by the Ramón y Cajal Programme (grant number RYC- 2014-16913). Sergio Trilles has been funded by the postdoctoral programme Vali+d (GVA) (grant number APOSTD/2016/058).

This book presents a user-centric framework that local open data authorities can use it to improve the ongoing initiatives towards a bottom-up approach. In an open data atmosphere where the accessibility of data portals is playing the main role, we discuss the importance of the reusability level and how data users are employing the available data. With the support of four cities (Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Valencia) their data authorities and users communities, this book presents the most common barriers, establishes a set of recommendations and also defines a set of concrete actions to enhance the level of reuse based on data users'experiences. Este libro presenta un marco centrado en el usuario que las autoridades locales de datos abiertos pueden usar para mejorar las iniciativas en curso hacia un enfoque de abajo hacia arriba. En una atmósfera de datos abierta donde la accesibilidad de los portales de datos está desempeñando el papel principal, discutimos la importancia del nivel de reutilización y cómo los usuarios de datos emplean los datos disponibles. Con el apoyo de cuatro ciudades (Bogotá, Cali, Medellín y Valencia), sus autoridades de datos y comunidades de usuarios, este libro presenta las barreras más comunes, establece un conjunto de recomendaciones y también define un conjunto de acciones concretas para mejorar el nivel de reutilización. en las experiencias de los usuarios de datos. Programa de Doctorat en Geoinformàtica