1. Searching in the Smart City?
An Information Access Challenge
DESIRES 2021 — 2nd International Conference on Design of Experimental
Search & Information REtrieval Systems. 16.09.2021.
Dr. Dirk Ahlers
Smart Sustainable Cities Group
NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology
https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/dirk.ahlers

2. 2 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge

3. 3 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Guiding Question
InfAccess /
Search
Engine(s)
Smart Cities
Cities, Citizens,
Data, Systems,
Integration
Why is there no smart city search engine? How would one
look like?
What is the challenge from an Information Access
perspective? What are opportunities, benefits, options,
requirements, integration challenges, …?

4. 4 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Smart City ICT Strategies
• Open ecosystem, not only driven by municipality
• Integration and combination of systems and silos
• Enabling urban change, Sustainable and livable urban futures
– Environmental, economical, societal, technical challenges
– Increase sustainability, resilience, livability
– Improve services, enable new services
– Digital transformation, digitalization
– Real-time city understanding
• Scalable and transferable solutions
• Combination of low- and high-tech solutions
• Integrated solutions, not only ICT

5. 5 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Smart City Services
Application Domains
• Public/city services
• Service discovery
• Location-aware services, POIs,
Events
• LBSN
• Tourist/route recommendations
• Mobility, transport, EVs, public
transport
• Social learning/Communities/SN
• Context-aware services
• Smart urban environments
• Sustainable behavior
• City planning/decision support
• Personal assistants
• Integrative systems
Data Sources
• Service websites/APIs
• City services
• (City) Open Data
• POI and event data
• Mobility options
• Social Networks
• User interactions
• Mobility traces
• IoT/sensors
• Crowdsourced data
• City maps/survey data
• Photos/(CCTV)
• Emergent sources

6. 6 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Smart City Search?
• Much information already available in usual SEs
• Make life easier, make sustainability easier
• Access to existing and new services
• Integrating over different systems (and ecosystems)
– Do individual services well
– Support integration across systems
• Data and information needs to be findable and accessible
– Services/data available on Web/app/APIs
– Services/data as public & open as possible
• Complex integrated search
– (e.g. bar + gt + public transport + view)

7. 7 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Topics of Interest
Smart City
Search
Specific
Search
Systems
Evaluation?
Handling
Complexity
Privacy
Openness
Cross-
Domain
integration
Data & system
integration and
interoperability
Scenario-
based
approaches
Context-
awareness
Integrated
Inf Access
Citizens,
Users,
Stakeholders
…
…

8. 8 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Takeaways
• Smart City is a challenging cross-domain IA scenario
• New challenges and opportunities arising
• The How is quite open
• Make cities more livable, sustainable, understandable!
Cities, Citizens,
Data, Systems,
Integration

9. 9 Searching in the Smart City? – An Information Access Challenge
Q&A
Contact
Dirk Ahlers
search://Dirk Ahlers
@dirkahlers
dirk.ahlers@ntnu.no
[http://desires.dei.unipd.it/papers/paper-19.pdf.pdf]
• Q: What are your requirements to a smart city search engine?