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Development of a Smart City Service Catalogue for Sensor-Based Digital Services

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Abstract

The increasing urban population growth leads to challenges in cities in many aspects: Urbanisation problems such as excessive environmental pollution or increasing urban traffic demand new and innovative solutions. In this context, the concept of smart cities is discussed. An enabling element of the smart city concept is applying information technology (IT) to improve administrative efficiency and quality of life while reducing costs and resource consumption and ensuring greater citizen participation in administrative and urban development issues. While these smart city services are technologically studied and implemented, government officials, citizens or businesses are often unaware of the large variety of smart city service solutions. Therefore, this work deals with developing a smart city services catalogue that documents best practice services to create a platform that brings citizens, city government, and businesses together. Although the concept of IT service catalogues is not new and guidelines and recommendations for the design and development of service catalogues already exist in the corporate context, there is little work on smart city service catalogues. Therefore, approaches from agile software development and pattern research were adapted to develop the smart city service catalogue platform in this work.
DEVELOPMENT OF A SMART CITY SERVICE
CATALOGUE FOR SENSOR-BASED DIGITAL SERVICES
Yusuf Bozkurt, Jan Fauser, Reiner Braun, Dieter Hertweck and Alexander Rossmann
Department of Computer Science, Reutlingen University,
72762 Reutlingen, Germany
ABSTRACT
The increasing urban population growth leads to challenges in cities in many aspects: Urbanisation problems such as
excessive environmental pollution or increasing urban traffic demand new and innovative solutions. In this context, the
concept of smart cities is discussed. An enabling element of the smart city concept is applying information technology
(IT) to improve administrative efficiency and quality of life while reducing costs and resource consumption and ensuring
greater citizen participation in administrative and urban development issues. While these smart city services are
technologically studied and implemented, government officials, citizens or businesses are often unaware of the large
variety of smart city service solutions. Therefore, this work deals with developing a smart city services catalogue that
documents best practice services to create a platform that brings citizens, city government, and businesses together.
Although the concept of IT service catalogues is not new and guidelines and recommendations for the design and
development of service catalogues already exist in the corporate context, there is little work on smart city service
catalogues. Therefore, approaches from agile software development and pattern research were adapted to develop the
smart city service catalogue platform in this work.
KEYWORDS
Smart City, Service Catalogue, IoT Service, Smart City Service Catalogue Platform, Transparency, Governance
1. INTRODUCTION
The shift of populations to cities and urban areas creates complex problems, for instance, environmental
impacts, rapid urbanisation, traffic etc. (Alberti et al., 2019). Cities play a significant role in the social and
economic development of any country. Digitalisation has a major impact on society and the economy
nowadays and in the future. According to Stolterman & Fors (2004), digitalisation, or digital transformation,
refers to "the changes associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society".
Digitisation enables a wide range of opportunities to develop new services in smart cities to address different
challenges related, e.g., climate change or urbanisation. Harakal'ova (2018) defines a smart city as the main
element of the smart city concept: the use of information technology to improve management efficiency and
standard of living while reducing costs and use of resources and ensuring greater participation of citizens in
matters of management and urban development. Many smart city services are available based on Internet of
Things (IoT) technology (Perera et al., 2014; Zanella et al., 2014). For example, the monitoring of CO2 and
NOx concentration in the cities with IoT sensors. That could provide city developers information regarding
the identification of green areas that have a significant impact on air quality (OKLab Köln, 2021). According
to Peng et al. (2017), little research has been done on the awareness of such smart city services and user
participation. Government officials, policymakers or SMEs are often unaware of the existing large variety of
smart city service solutions (Kramers et al., 2014). Additionally, another barrier in enterprises or cities is
their uncertainty about which technologies exist or to choose from to address the requirements for a concrete
use case. Another issue is implementing the service effectively and determining the maturity of available
service (Rachinger et al., 2019). In addition, high implementation costs and lack of technical experts in
municipalities and enterprises are often a barrier.
To address these problems, the paper at hand deals with developing a smart city services catalogue that
documents best practice services to create a platform to bring citizens, city government, and businesses
together. A smart city service catalogue platform structures and describes existing services, supports
International Conferences Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing 2021;
Connected Smart Cities 2021;
and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2021
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developing new ideas and identifying and implementing new smart city services. Such a service catalogue
represents the first point of contact to the service. It facilitates the contact between interested parties and
providers, and users/cities that have already implemented this service. Vice versa, this leads to time and cost
savings when implementing smart city services (Yuaca et al., 2019). We formulated the following research
question for this paper: What are the components to develop a smart city service catalogue platform?
To answer this research question, we developed a concrete implementation of the smart city service
catalogue platform iteratively, described in this paper and available online at www.smartcity-services.de. The
rest of this paper is structured as follows: In section 2, we will introduce some background information and
discuss related work. Section 3 describes our development process for the smart city service catalogue
platform, and in section 4, we present the implemented service catalogue platform. In the last section, we
summarise the main findings and discuss future research.
2. BACKGROUND
The urban population today makes up 56 % of the world's population. By 2050, the population is expected to
increase to 68 % (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018). This growth leads to
multiple challenges in different areas of a city (e.g. waste management, traffic management, public
transportation). The European Commission (Catriona et al., 2014) structures smart cities in following six
dimensions: Smart governance, smart environment, smart mobility, smart living, smart people and smart
economy (Bozkurt et al., 2020; Caragliu et al., 2011; Catriona et al., 2014; Giffinger & Gudrun, 2010).
Bozkurt et al. (2020) analyse these six dimensions and rank them according to their popularity in the
scientific literature. According to this work, smart environment represents the most studied dimension, while
smart economy ranks last. According to Bozkurt et al. (2020), the dimensions cover the following topics:
1) Smart environment focuses on sustainable and environmentally friendly urban development using
information and communications technology (ICT). Activities range from smart buildings to energy-saving
measures for IoT services. 2) Smart governance deals with, e.g., smart city strategy development,
transparency and necessary framework conditions for digitalisation projects and smart city initiatives.
3) Intelligent transport systems, optimisation and creation of mobility services are discussed in smart
mobility. Citizen participation, social justice, education and co-creation are discussed in 4) smart people.
Literature on 5) smart living deals mainly with e-health, but also with smart home topics. Finally, the last
dimension, 6) smart economy deals with data-driven business models and business generation in different
data life cycle layers.
Despite some dimensions of smart cities are already visible and studied, it is still difficult to give an
all-accepted definition of smart cities. For example, Caragliu et al. (2011) emphasise economic growth and
high quality of life through the combination of traditional urban infrastructure and ICT and the investment in
human and social capital and participatory governance. Lombardi et al. (2012) share a similar view, linking
social and environmental issues with the application of ICTs. Cretu (2012) emphasises integrating ICT into
every aspect of human life and new thinking paradigms in governance and economy. Washburn & Sindhu
(2010) supported a more technological perspective considering smart cities as a collection of ICTs applied to
urban infrastructure and services. In contrast, Kourtit et al. (2012) advocate a knowledge-intensive and
creative perspective on human and social capital, infrastructure and entrepreneurial capital. Despite numerous
definitions and views, the role of ICT as an enabler of smart city activities appears as a common element.
Smart city applications and services are deployed across the city to address challenges such as pollution,
ageing society and resource scarcity. Government agencies and businesses are interested in using ICT as an
enabler of new smart services. Mainly discussed smart city service areas are transportation (e.g. smart
parking, smart traffic lights), healthcare (e.g. patient monitoring systems), energy (e.g. smart grids), public
safety services (e.g. smart surveillance), building management, waste management and education (Peng
et al., 2017). There is a general understanding that the proper use of smart city services can sustainably
improve a city's liveability (Lee & Lee, 2014; Peng et al., 2017; Piro et al., 2014; Yeh, 2017; Yigitcanlar
& Lee, 2014). While these smart city services are being technologically studied and implemented, little
research has been done on the awareness of such services and user participation (Peng et al., 2017). To better
understand the users of smart city services, Lytras & Visvizi (2018) conducted a qualitative study and
questioned 102 participants on the usage of smart city services. One of the aspects of the study addressed the
main concerns of citizens when using smart city services. It resulted that 45% of the respondents were
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concerned about security and privacy. This concern was followed by data protection (25%), lack of
transparency (8%), ethical concerns (6%), required soft skills (5%), third party awareness (5%) and
complexity of services (4%). These concerns can be overcome through a high level of transparency of smart
city services. Therefore, a smart city service catalogue platform with best practices worldwide is the first
approach to bring citizens, city administration and businesses together.
The concept of a service catalogue is not new and has been addressed and discussed by companies for
years as part of IT governance frameworks such as ITIL or COBIT. Many articles deal with this topic and
state the necessity and the advantages of service catalogues for companies (e.g. transparent communication of
existing IT services) (Horvat et al., 2013; Taconi et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2010). There is no standard design for
a service catalogue. Still, the ITIL framework describes some mandatory components: 1) A general list of all
services offered, 2) a sufficient description of each service, 3) the alignment between IT and business, 4) the
operation level agreement, 5) the service level agreement and 6) the underlying contract (Sembiring
& Surendro, 2016). Such a catalogue is primarily used to communicate services transparently and create a
consistent picture of the service portfolio (Horvat et al., 2013; Meriwether, 2014; Sembiring & Surendro,
2016; Sipina, 2011; Taconi et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2010). Although first smart city service catalogues are
already visible (IoT Collaborative, n.d.; OASCITIES, 2021; UNPARALLEL Innovation, 2021), the topic of
smart city service catalogues has remained almost unaddressed in the scientific community.
3. DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Although various publications already exist, there is no consensus on what a service catalogue should look
like. These publications and guides are primarily for businesses to assist them in designing and creating
service catalogues (Horvat et al., 2013). Hubbers et al. (2007), for example, emphasise the decomposition of
all business processes and the analysis of the IT infrastructure as well as the business goals as a starting point
of creating a service catalogue. Kieninger et al. (2011) propose an approach to classify IT services into ten
groups (e.g. standard application services, intranet services, backup services). A similar approach is described
by Arcilla et al. (2013) by grouping services into hardware, email, backup. Taconi et al. (2014) propose a
framework for identifying services and creating service catalogues structured in 9 phases and provides a step
by step workflow for identifying available IT services in the company. However, all this valuable work is not
directly applicable to creating a smart city service catalogue platform. An enterprise service catalogue, for
example, lists and describes the IT services available in the company and the connected business processes.
Nevertheless, in the case of the smart city service catalogue platform, we intend to present best practices
from different cities to provide ideas for implementing new services and enable an exchange of services
between various stakeholders.
Fehling et al. (2015) describe a three-phase model for 1) identification, 2) authoring, and 3) application of
patterns in different domains with multiple actors. They describe the approach by referring to patterns in
cloud computing, cloud data, application management, costumes in films and green business process. These
domains are characterised by their high diversity, making a homogenised general description of patterns
complex (Fehling et al., 2015). The basic approach of this methodology proved to be suitable for our project,
as the topic of smart cities is also a strongly interdisciplinary field with a multi-stakeholder structure (Albino
et al., 2015; Bozkurt et al., 2020; Giffinger & Gudrun, 2010; Lombardi et al., 2012). We were able to adopt
the approach of Fehling et al. (2015) to identify and describe smart city services and create the service
catalogue platform with minor modifications. That led to the development framework shown in Figure 1,
which is the foundation of our work. The framework's core is the agile work approach of the research team,
which develops and synchronises the service catalogue in regular sprints. Theoretical findings from the
literature represent the foundation of the framework. In addition, the entire work is supported by the "Best
Practices" and "Requirements" pillars, which represent findings from existing references and potential user
groups.
International Conferences Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing 2021;
Connected Smart Cities 2021;
and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2021
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Figure 1. Development Framework
We needed to consider the fundamental question of who the potential users of the online smart city
service catalogue platform are. Therefore, potential users were identified initially in a workshop with
graduate students and experts from the smart city field. As a result, the following personas were developed:
1) City administration (decision-makers and employees), 2) citizens and communities, 3) companies,
4) teaching and research institutions. Besides developing the personas, the theoretical foundation was
established by the scientific literature on smart cities, service catalogues and smart city services (see Chapter
2). These findings were continuously taken into account. A smart city service catalogue platform flourishes
through its multitude of existing services and also stimulates the expansion of services through its abundance.
Therefore, it was essential for us to offer many services in the very first version of the service catalogue.
For this reason, the research team conducted an extensive search for existing smart city services. Th at
involved a detailed review of existing service catalogues, smart city IoT communities and smart city service
providers (e.g. eco curious, 2021; element14, 2021; Smart City Solutions, 2021; TTN Ulm, 2021). Each
research member recorded the services at a detailed level to create a collective pool of smart city services in a
first step. In the subsequent step, the research group reviewed the collection of smart city services in a
workshop to identify relevant and universal categories to describe smart city services. In the second iteration,
missing information was completed, and new services were included. Subsequently, the services were
categorised according to the six smart city dimensions and resulted in a first version of the service catalogue
as an Excel file.
The service catalogue was supposed to be available as an online service catalogue platform from the
beginning, easily accessible and transparent for different users. But before developing the service catalogue
as a platform, we created mock-ups based on the previously created service catalogue (Excel file) and
considering the personas. Mock-ups helped us understand at an early stage that categorising the service
catalogue platform according to the six smart city dimensions is not the right design for our target group.
Especially the dimensions smart economy, smart living and smart people are not intuitive for general readers.
Therefore, we decided to adopt five easily understandable high-level dimensions for the service catalogue
platform as the entry point, namely 1) mobility, 2) environment, 3) public, 4) living and 5) industry. These
five dimensions are still based on Catriona et al. (2014), but the understanding is easier for the general
readers. After this revision, a preliminary version of the online service catalogue platform was implemented
and filled with the first pilot services. The insertion of these pilot services helped us to gain new insights for
further improvements. After implementing these insights, the remaining services were uploaded.
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4. SERVICE CATALOGUE
We used the content management system (CMS) Word Press 1to implement our smart city service catalogue
platform. Word Press is one of the most used CMS worldwide (Schäferhoff & WebSiteSetup, 2021;
W3Techs, 2021). The platform aims to provide open source and commercial available best practice examples
of IoT network services to different actors. Moreover, the platform offers a service catalogue for
sensor-based, digital services (IoT services) and enables the exchange of services. The implemented smart
city service catalogue is available on www.smartcity-services.de.
In Chapter 3, we described the five main categories in which we structured the different services, which
supports the navigation and identification of relevant services for different user groups. We defined the
category "Environment" as services that are monitoring environmental changes and used in, e.g., agriculture,
buildings and energy savings etc. "Mobility" is defined as services in public or private transportation and
traffic management. The category "Public" describes services for optimising the management of public
infrastructure, city administration, citizen participation or education. Services in health, society and home
were categorised in the category Living. In the category Industry, services for industrial usage such as
condition monitoring or predictive maintenance were assigned. A service can be assigned to more than one
category. For instance, the service "Vehicle / Asset Tracking" (LoRa Alliance, 2021). It is a
LoRaWAN-based (The Things Network, 2021) GPS tracker for tracking products or material of a company.
It supports optimising (intra-) logistic processes in container and asset management, warehouse and inventory
scenarios, outdoor tracking, theft protection. Another scenario of "Asset Tracking" can also be in the public
area, such as tracking bicycles of a sharing provider. To strengthen the community and the platform idea, we
implemented a form that allows everyone to add a service to the service catalogue platform in a predefined
structure. After a successful review, the service will be published on the service catalogue platform. In Table
1, we have listed the 32 services, which are currently available on the service catalogue platform. In addition,
each service has a short description, and the assigned categories of the service are shown.
We developed a standardised format for describing the services to increase comprehensibility and address
the users' different requirements. Inspired by Alexander et al. (1977) pattern description, we developed a
structure to describe the individual services. To identify the service, each service has a title. A visualisation
of a service on our smart city service catalogue platform is shown in Figure 2 ("DIY Fine Dust Sensor"). For
quick visual identification of a service, we use cover images, which we assigned to the different categories,
for example, environment or mobility. In which category a service was assigned is listed under the title. For
further filter and description purposes, we assigned tags to every service. This should enable users to search
the service catalogue beyond the different categories, such as a specific technology or keyword. We used the
following tags to describe further the service "DIY Fine Dust Sensor": #Air #citizenscience #sensor. Below
the tag section is a short description of the service. A short description should not exceed 30 words and
summarises the key value proposition of the service. The short description aims to communicate the main
idea of the service effectively and efficiently to the reader. In order to better understand the service,
especially readers with non-IT background, a video, if available, is embedded in the service description. The
category "Abstract" offers a detailed explanation of the service, structured in use case, functionality and
benefits. This is intended to achieve a deeper understanding of the service for a user. The category "Place of
operation" shows the country or the city where the service is already in usage. This should enable the user to
evaluate the implementation in the context of regional factors, especially regarding data protection laws,
which differ significantly between different countries and impact the implementation of a service. The
"Licensing Model" category describes how a service is licensed, such as commercial licensing or open
source. This is a piece of relevant information for evaluating any costs incurred by implementing the service.
In addition, open-source services may also have specific implementation requirements. For the category
"Technological Architecture", we used a toolchain approach to visualise the architecture components and
their relationships, such as hardware, software, and communication protocols. Additionally, we give a short
description of the technological architecture. This provides the user with an overview of technical
implementation details.
1 https://wordpress.com/
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Connected Smart Cities 2021;
and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2021
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Table 1. Smart City Services (E=Environment; M=Mobility; P=Public; L=Living; I=Industry)
Service title
Short description
Categories
M
P
L
I
Connected Beehive for
beekeeping
This service provides temperature and humidity monitoring of connected
beehives to save bees and make life easier for beekeepers.
District heating
monitoring
The service describes the implementation for district heating monitoring
based on LoRaWAN.
x
x
DIY Fine Dust Sensor
This service describes how to build an own open source based fine dust
sensor and measure air pollution.
x
DIY Noise Measuring
Sensor
This service describes how to build an open source based digital noise
measurement system and measure noise pollution in your urban area.
x
DIY Pax Counter ESP32
This service describes how to build a mini Pax counter, a proof-of-concept
device for people monitoring in real-time and anonymously.
x
x
x
x
DIY Radiation
Measurement
This service describes how to build an open-source Geiger counter, which
measures radiation to contribute your data to the community.
Door & Window event
monitoring
This service describes how to integrate a system for door & windows
event monitoring based on LoRaWAN or Zigbee.
x
DYI NO2 Sensor
This open-source-based project offers a sensor-based service for
monitoring air quality.
x
x
Earthquake/ground
vibrations for
construction sites
The application is used to analyse earthquakes and their magnitude. The
purpose is to ensure the accuracy of sensitive measuring devices during
construction work.
x
Energy Management
System (EMS)
The Energy Management System (EMS) is based on LoRaWAN that can
be used in measurements of energy consumption in private and public
institutions.
x
x
x
Feedback Buttons
Wireless customer feedback buttons can be used to request customer
opinions with low energy consumption.
x
x
Flood water tracking
With the support of Flood Network, live data can be displayed showing
where water levels are high, or flooding is imminent.
x
General Tracing
Basic asset tracing based on LoRaWAN and GPS for localisation.
x
x
x
Ground sensors for frost
and snow
The sensors implemented in the ground can provide helpful information to
local road maintenance services to optimise the winter services.
x
Parking sensors
Smart parking sensor solutions reduce the amount of traffic searching for
a free parking space and reduce noise and air pollution emissions.
x
x
x
Recognition of structural
damage
The service provides a condition monitoring and anomaly detection of
small and hardly visible structure damages in bridges or walls.
x
x
x
Smart Health: Infrared
Temperature Sensor
Real-time data from the temperature sensors enables healthcare workers to
screen individuals with a high temperature efficiently.
x
Smart home sensor
empowered by
LoRaWAN
This room-sensor service enables the monitoring of temperature, humidity
or CO2.
x
x
x
Smart Lighting Indoor
A smart LED light bulb with which the lighting can be adjusted to
different activities.
x
x
Smart metering
This service enables the monitoring of gas, water and heat in households
by using LoRaWAN.
x
Smart pest traps
This service describes the implementation of condition monitoring of the
traps status and toxin amount for rats and mouse traps.
x
x
Smart Smoke Detector
Smoke detector with radio interface for LoRaWAN and Wireless M-Bus.
These small but effective devices are an essential early warning system
for fire safety.
x
x
x
Smart Traffic Lights
This service enables the automatisation of the traffic flow based on data
analytics.
x
x
x
x
Smart Waste
This service describes the implementation of a network of sensor-based
smart garbage containers, which enables the monitoring of the waste level.
This data can be used to optimise the routing of waste collection tours.
x
Soil Moisture Sensor
The soil moisture sensor connected to LoRaWAN enables the monitoring
of soil parameters for optimal plant care.
x
Street Lighting
empowered by
Intelligent street lighting based on LoRaWAN optimises infrastructure
management and energy consumption.
x
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LoRaWAN
Traffic Counter
empowered by
LoRaWAN
This service provides a traffic counter based on LoRaWAN, transmitting
and recording the number of incoming vehicles in urban areas.
x
x
Vehicle / Asset Tracking
LoRaWAN based GPS can track vehicles or other assets in a long-range.
x
x
Vibration monitoring
empowered by
LoRaWAN
Real-time monitoring of individual machines with LoRaWAN sensors to
alert users of defects or malfunctions.
x
Water Flow Monitoring
System
The flow measurement station allows users to detect abnormal water flow
rates that indicate leaks and blockages.
x
x
Water flow velocity
measuring system
System for measuring water flows within autonomous water systems can
be used for predictive/planned maintenance.
x
Water
Quality/monitoring
Drinking water monitoring allows monitoring the quality of tap water in
cities.
x
x
x
Furthermore, the user gains an idea about the service's functionality on a technical level and can identify
potential gaps in infrastructure or knowledge. In the category "Link / Repository / References," we provided
the links of the concrete services, e.g. from a service provider or, in the case of a prototype to a GitHub
repository. This provides the user with additional information and allows them to explore the specific service
further.
Figure 2. Smart city services description
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and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2021
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5. CONCLUSION
The goal of this work was to describe the development of a smart city service catalogue platform based on an
actual implementation. Despite multiple perspectives on smart cities and different definitions, the application
of ICT as an enabler of smart city services is visible. Existing city services are optimised through ICT by
integrating sensors into the physical world. But also new and innovative services for cities are developed
with the use of ICT. An online catalogue of such services and best practices from cities worldwide can foster
innovation in other cities. Driven by this motivation, we developed a platform for smart city services that
helps cities develop new ideas and identify and implement new smart city services. However, the service
catalogue platform is not only addressed to the city government but also to businesses, individual interested
citizens, communities, and educational and research institutions. Although the concept of IT service
catalogues is not new and guidelines and recommendations for the design and development of service
catalogues already exist in the corporate context, there is little work on smart city service catalogues.
Therefore, we have adapted approaches from agile software development and pattern research to develop the
smart city service catalogue platform. This systematic approach has made it possible to develop the service
catalogue iteratively in a project team with several researchers and students.
The results of this work provide practical and theoretical contributions. Practitioners can use this paper
and the developed service catalogue as a guideline for creating smart city service catalogues in their region or
their specific domain. Furthermore, the service catalogue is a valuable opportunity to share services and use it
as a platform with different stakeholders. In this way, interested parties and providers can easily find each
other. We hope that this will lead to a high level of transparency, innovation and stimulation of smart city
activities by making it easier to get started. The theoretical contribution is that researchers can use this work
to enhance the methodology and conduct further research on smart city service catalogues. Service
catalogues are discussed in science and practice, but only from a business perspective. This work shows that
there is no framework or guideline for the creation of service catalogues for smart city services, although
smart city services are often discussed, and service catalogues are an essential element for transparency and
open exchange. Furthermore, the service catalogue provides a basis for developing patterns in the smart city
domain by conducting the phases 2) and 3) described by (Fehling et al., 2015). In addition to patterns,
reference architectures for ICT-supported smart city services can also be developed, and business models for
smart city services can be analysed using the smart city service catalogue platform.
The services have only been researched and prepared by one team. That means that there may be some
human bias in the search for services, and we may have considered only limited aspects. Furthermore, due to
the Corona pandemic, regular workshops with interested citizens and other stakeholders could not be held
throughout the development of the service catalogue. Consequently, the workshops were mostly limited to
the core research team. Nevertheless, these limitations also indicate the direction of further research. As the
smart city service catalogue platform is already online, it will be possible to bring it to the public on a large
scale and collect feedback for further improvements. Besides the continuous development, it is also important
to upload more services, as a large number of services simulates further ideas. For this purpose, we have
contacted several European partner institutions that will upload services from their countries. In this way, a
continuous increase in awareness and in the number of services with the self-service functionality will be
achieved.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Experts from the Working Group on Digitisation (PA8) from countries such as Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia,
Germany, Romania, Slovenia supported by the State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg. Finally, we would like
to thank the students Ibrahim Sevik, Benjamin Nußer, Andreas Knoll and Damiano Squillante who supported
the implementation of the service catalogue platform.
ISBN: 978-989-8704-32-0 © 2021
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