These benefit to be achieved require high levels of sophistication and involvement in terms of the applications, resources and people involved. The opportunities
to achieve these benefits are available; however, they require investing in more technology, better development
efforts and effective use of big data. There is also the
need to set policies to ensure data accuracy, high quality,
high security, privacy, and control of the data as well as
using data documentation standards to provide guidance
on the content and use of the datasets [10]. In addition,
technology can be very useful when considering the
management and protection of environmental resources
and infrastructures, and natural resources with the ultimate goal of increasing sustainability [11].
Big data applications have the potential to serve many
sectors in a smart city [8]. It helps provide better customer experiences and services, which help businesses
achieve better performance (e/.g. higher profits or increased market shares). Improve healthcare by improving preventive care services, diagnosis and treatment
tools, healthcare records management and patient care.
Transportation systems can greatly benefit from big data
to optimize route and schedules, accommodate for varying demands and being more environmentally friendly.
Deploying big data applications require the support of
a good information and communication technology
(ICT) infrastructure. ICT supports smart cities because
it provides useful solutions and also unique solutions
that may not be possible without it. For example, it enables efficient transport planning by providing easy ways
to handle their services from different fields/locations to
reduce transportation costs [11]. Other examples include
providing better water management and improved waste
management by applying innovations to effectively manage these services. For example, waste management includes waste collection, disposal, recycling, and recovery
[12], all of which can be efficiently managed using ICT
solutions. More examples include new construction and
structural methods for the health of buildings and better
environment; risk management; safety and security; air
quality and pollution; public health; urban sprawl; biodiversity loss; and energy efficiency. In general, a smart
city can be made smarter when utilizing ICT and big
data for many of its applications and services.
Adopting ICT, Cloud and big data solutions will help
address many issues such as providing the storage and
analysis tools. In addition this will help to reach the
innovation stage [2] and encourage collaboration and
communication between the different entities of a smart
city. This can be done by building big data communities
to work as one entity to foster collaborative and creative
solutions addressing applications for areas like education, health, energy, law, manufacturing, environment,
and safety. This also helps in real-time solutions to challenges in agriculture, transportation, and crowd management as applications and systems are integrated and
information flows easily cross applications and entities
[10]. There are many examples of big data applications
serving smart cities such as: