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attached 2 papers on smart city related topic. the request is to review these papers with at least two pages for each.

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12 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City Alessandro Aurigi Introduction The emergence of the Information Society has been catalyzing numerous changes within our cities and regions, as well as setting the scene for many projects that aim to enhancing the quality of urban life through the exploitation of new Information and Communication Technologies. The fact that ICTs can allow users to transcend, at least to a certain extent, the typical limitations in space and time of traditional lifestyles and working practices, is generating an interest for the social impacts of IT in our towns and regions, as well as for the opportunities that can stem from the applications of these technologies. Making wide use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could be seen as the new frontier of strategic thinking and planning in the 24hour city, as providing and sharing information and services electronically seems a factor generating huge potential benefits to many aspects of urban life. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have started relying on exploiting new technologies and the Internet. City management is considering the benefits of electronically distributed services very seriously, as proved by the numerous projects developed in the past decade in many European cities. Democracy and participation to public life and decision-making processes could be enhanced by the fruition of virtual public spaces that alAlessandro Aurigi is a lecturer at Newcastle University, where he is the director of the MSc programme in Digital Architecture, a member of the Architectural Informatics (AI) research group, and an associate member of the Global Urbanism Research Unit (GURU). He has previously worked as a lecturer at the Bartlett School of the Built Environment, University College London, as a research fellow in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL, and as a research associate in the Construction Informatics group at Newcastle University. He has also been member of the Centre for Urban Technology (CUT) at Newcastle University. His main research interest is studying the relationships between the emergence of the “information society” and the ways we imagine, conceive, represent, and manage buildings and cities. He may be reached at . Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Spring 2005, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 12-26. Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 13 low both synchronous and asynchronous dialogue among citizens, and between citizens and administrators. To support these aims, several technological applications have been considered during the past few years, from traditional WWW sites and Usenetlike discussion areas, to smart card applications and “digital signature” technologies. Implementation of online Geographical Information Systems for providing and sharing a wealth of spatial information has been surging, and more sophisticated ways to deliver place-sensitive information to wirelessly connected devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are being explored. For instance, the research and development work around the “3DSpaceTag” technology shows how new intangible yet three-dimensional electronic layers can be added to the physical city and its places, in order to augment them, accessing the information layer through an increasingly common—in Japan at least— GPS-enabled mobile phone (Tarumi et al., 2003). This paper is about the shaping of this increasingly “digital” city that we live in, but it does not focus on the characteristics of the projects it is made of, and their contents. Instead, it tries to reflect on how its character can be affected by the visions and interpretations of what the city is, and of what role new technologies can play. In a way it is a reflection on processes, rather than contents, and on what underpins different approaches and configurations of the digital city. These reflections are based on the critical comparison of information from different sources, mainly case studies and literature on digital city related projects in Europe. Most of these analyses were carried out by several scholars, including the author, in the late 1990s, when the debate on embryonic digital cities seemed particularly alive. About all of the projects considered had been started and run not by city planners, but by IT officers, local politicians and bureaucrats, who ended up being the main informants in the investigations. These studies provide powerful insights on the different views and interpretations of the city—and its electronically augmented version—from the actors involved in shaping the initiatives. It is argued that these are now more than ever precious in making us reflect on the future trajectories for digital cities. The “Digital” City Many urban implementations of high technologies have in the past been presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site, typically based on World Wide Web technology. In the 1990s these web-based information systems assumed a strong symbolic role for telematics-based innovation in cities. These were often calling themselves “digital cities,” borrowing their name mainly from the very well known and paradigmatic experience of De Digitale Stad (The Digital City, that is) virtual community in Amsterdam. Digital cities—or sometimes “virtual” cities—had therefore been identified by some commentators as those locations adopting specific electronic models, replicas, or interfaces that would help making sense of the new urban electronic services being made available. In the simplest of the cases, these were civic 14 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 Internet portals and the information and services attached to them. Other types of “virtual city” were anyway being developed as three-dimensional models of cities—or parts of them—and used mainly for simulation exercises, or as sophisticated bases for the handling of geographical information through GIS systems. However, this paper tries to consider the “digital city” as a much more holistic concept that goes beyond both the information portal as well as the simulation model. As appropriately noted by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker, we now need to think much “wider”: “Where does the ‘digital city’ exist in the scheme of things? By this time, all cities, whether by design or by accident, whether in a deteriorating or renaissance state are, to some degree, ‘digital’” (Gumpert and Drucker, 2003). It is increasingly becoming pointless to label specific projects—such as the web-based portals—as the quintessential “digital cities.” The dualism between cyberspace and space, which so much animated debates on urban futures in the 1990s is gradually fading out to leave us with a situation in which technology is a much more embedded, ubiquitous, and “everyday” part of our lives (Haythornthwaite and Wellman, 2002; Cuff, 2003). If digital urban technology is getting less “symbolic” and it is losing its appeal of a “novelty” that everybody feels compelled to talk about, this does not imply that it is getting less important or relevant for our lives and our cities. The processes that lead to the shaping of the “digital city,” meaning by this not just the web-based information systems, but all those different ways to augment the city and tackle the improvement of urban functions through the application of telematics, are more than ever a crucially important aspect of urban development. Little research has been carried out on these wider themes, but literature and research related mainly to the initial phenomenon of software-based, portal-like “digital cities” is still relevant and can prove a very useful starting point to reflect on the shapes that the augmented digital city could take. This paper uses elements of the past research and debate, mainly on portal-like digital cities, and makes reflections that can apply to a wider discussion on the design and social shaping of very different types of civic telematics initiatives, and ultimately of our digitally augmented urban environments. Interpreting the City, Shaping Its Technology The literature and research reports on the “digital city” phenomenon, apart from describing interesting case studies and communicating ideas and proposals, can show how technological innovation can be influenced and driven by factors that are social, economic, but also cultural and philosophical. The “digital city” might be characterized as a series of innovative projects that are going to change the face of our towns and affect the way we use them but, at the same time, it is important to consider that the very way we see and interpret our towns, what they are and how they work, and by whom they are made of, will have a deep impact on how technological “solutions” are configured and run. The way we look at the city is the way we look at the “digital” city, and the way we develop it. Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 15 These claims find a theoretical basis within the sociological approach known as “Social Construction of Technology.” This allows us to concentrate on important concepts such as the “interpretative flexibility” of the several actors involved in shaping a technological artifact—which can well be a digital city project or system—and how these different interpretations can generate designs and policies. Bijker for instance notes that “The design details of artefacts are described by focusing on the problems and solutions that those relevant social groups have with respect to the artefact,” and “The interpretative flexibility of an artefact can be demonstrated by showing how, for different social groups, the artefact presents itself as essentially different artefacts” (Bijker, 1992: 75-76). Therefore it seems important to focus on these interpretations and what they can mean for the new augmented city. Through observations and research on web-based digital city facilities, I have noticed how initiatives apparently very similar, based on the same technological objects and developments, can be shaped and function very differently according to the ways their entrepreneurs look at the “city,” and to what vision they have of urban reality. I have also noticed how the same initiative can change its character and functionality thanks to the dynamic changes of its underlying interpretations of the city and the role of high technology within it. Evans et al. (2001) have inspiringly looked at competing views of the city within the context of the “shaping” of sustainable transport policies for the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the United Kingdom. Examining policy and strategic documents compiled by different agencies involved in the transport planning arena, they could recognize within these approaches three different ways of interpreting the city, and their potential consequences on the future of mobility in a medium-size British town. They would call these approaches “The fortress city,” “The audited city,” and “The reflexive city” (Evans et al., 2001). Similarly, this paper proposes three competing, though often co-existing, visions of the city that affect what the digital city ends up being, and its relationship with the citizens and the society to which it is supposed to bring benefits. The three “cities”—or better, ways to see the city—described below have been given the names of “machine city of the experts,” “accessible city of the open government,” and “shared city of communities.” Interestingly enough, these reflections are also very close to what Beatrice Van Bastelaer and Claire Lobet-Maris have concluded observing the digital city phenomenon in its early stages and reflecting upon three models of development of civic networking initiatives, that they called “the control or regulation model,” “the experimentation or flexible model” and the “open or laissez-faire model” (Van Balstelaer and Lobet-Maris, 1999). The views of the city proposed here are associated to very different conceptions of what information, knowledge, and skills are necessary to manage urban spaces successfully. What knowledge is needed to run the city, and who holds it? Where does the information, but above all the “wisdom” of places, come from, and can this be used to produce key knowledge and “solutions” for urban problems? Who should be allowed to access and modify the civic 16 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 system of knowledge? When it comes to the digital city, what is the role of high technologies in dealing with this knowledge? And what people and skills are needed to successfully run the digital city? The following sections explore different ways to conceive the (digital) city and to address those questions, and they do so by drawing from existing literature as well as the results of case studies carried out in the cities of Bologna (Italy), which developed the “Iperbole” initiative, and Bristol (United Kingdom) and “Digital City Bristol Interactive” towards the end of the 1990s. The “Machine” City of the Experts Talking about “city as a machine” evokes modernism and what Charles Jencks defines—within the field of Architecture—as “The overpowering faith in industrial progressivism and its translation into the pure, white International Style (or at least the Machine Aesthetic) with the goal of transforming society both in its sensibility and social make-up” (Jencks, 1996: 23). Although this paper deals with implementations of high technologies in cities, rather than aesthetics, the modernist ethos of designing for the average person as well as interpreting citizens as the passive receivers and beneficiaries of any design improvements, within a rather deterministic cause-and-effect chain, seems the same in both cases. If the city is a “machine,” urban high technology can be seen as the “upgrade” kit for making the mechanism work better. Urban space is perceived as functionally very complex—and therefore requires innovative tools to make sense of this functional complexity—but it is also seen as socially very simple, so that it can be affected in a straightforward manner. In one way or another, the problem of making the city a better place to live goes down to inducing events, preventing others from happening, modifying—by regulation and control—the behavior of those “live” gears of the machine that are the citizens. As Evans et al. notice in their paper on transport planning, this attitude towards “control and compulsion” is a feature of the “conventional planning approach” still very much dominant in cities and municipalities in Europe and beyond. This vision is also clearly deterministic in nature, and considers fixing problems by technology as a set of causes that will produce obvious effects. When interviewed within a research carried out on web cities and civic networks, the city manager in Bologna, Italy—one of the most prominent locations for urban high technology innovation in Europe, and the developers of the “Iperbole” civic network—stated that “My strategy aims to make the machine-city work and be more efficient. It does not tend to give answers about social cohesion and social functioning of the city. Those have to be dealt with by the mayor and the other politicians. However, it is obvious that a better working Council is a contribution to development and quality of life” (Fermi, 1997). Most projects tending to deliver ICT-based services in the city, as well as implementations of IT-based tools to control and forecast civic developments, usage of space, vehicle and pedestrian behavior, etc., seem to stem from this mechanistic point of view. And the “machine” can only be understood, and run, by those who are institutionally supposed to know it well. Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 17 The needs of the city, and what can be implemented by the digital city initiatives to fulfill them, are then defined through a more or less rigorous approach by scientists and experts of urban problems, city management, and bureaucracy. As in the analysis by Evans et al., this happens within an institutional and policy world that is kept extremely simple. Few agencies are considered and involved in the project, and often they end up with a marginal role compared to the governmental bodies. Whenever external partners are called to take part in any of the projects related to the shaping of the digital city, this is likely to happen in a subordinate, provider-to-customer fashion. It tends to be a government-centered approach, in which partnerships exist only on a commercial basis, or to take advantage of research funds on offer, but rarely involve an active sharing of powers in the planning of the digital city. As a logic of control prevails, the initiatives tend to be indifferent to citizens and local communities, who are seen as the passive audience of what the “experts” are going to offer them in terms of electronic services and information, or plain regulation of civic life. Even digital facilities that offer a degree of interactivity can still be essentially one-way and shaped exclusively by a restricted group of technocrats. Presenting the online Geographical Information System for the city of Turin, Guido Bolatto et al. tell us that “Professional users would have therefore the opportunity to search for laws, town planning schemes, urban regulations, and maps related to their work. Technical public offices … would maintain a constant contact and be always up-to-dated to the latest changes. The common users enquiring on their houses, their district, municipal services, public documents, would obtain information easily and for free” (Bolatto et al., 1999: 98). The question here is: who owns the relevant information and knowledge? Where does it come from? It seems evident that knowledge comes from—and is managed by—the “experts,” the “technical public offices” that would always be up-to-date, while the general public and professionals alike are meant to be end-users, or we could say consumers, of the information. The emphasis on expert control goes beyond the relationship of city managers and the external world. Even within local authorities themselves, the perspective of the machine-city is revealed by a simplification of the policymaking arena. In fact it happens rather often that the management, design and decision-making over digital city initiatives is retained by a small number of departments within a municipality, and lacks links to an overall, inter-departmental strategy of development (Aurigi, 2003: 279). In those cases where the machine-city vision is dominant, the main factor for developing a successful “digital city” will be perceived as the need for employing capable experts, acquiring or producing effective expert systems and/or models to implement. In the case of the Provincial Information System of Macerata, Italy, the managers and analysts of the project perceived as an investment of paramount importance the employment of good technical and publishing staff, while no mention was made on ideas to involve non-technical actors and the general public (Polzonetti and De Simone, 1998). This attitude facilitates the production of “closed” IT initiatives in cities. Many of these are “expert-only” systems for decision support and city man- 18 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 agement that local communities are not supposed to know about, and are run in the exclusive environments of university laboratories or civic planning departments. Others are public Internet sites that however address only a limited audience of external investors and tourists, or provide a one-way stream of information and services through the council’s databases (Aurigi and Graham, 2000). Other initiatives, such as the omnipresent CCTV surveillance systems in U.K. cities are developed following logics of top-down control where the operator of the system can have an overview of the city and the activities that go on in it. Similarly, research is being carried out on the exploitation of software-enabled real-time control over determinate parts of the city to manage emergency situations like the consequences of a fire or a terrorist attack in an underground station. Nakanishi et al. (2003) for instance have been working on an “Evacuation Leadership System” in which operators can interact with a three-dimensional model representing the real-time events in an underground station, in which the information is fed through sophisticated 360 degrees CCTV. The operator can select the characters on the screen corresponding to real people—likely to be in panic—and communicate with them through their mobile phone in a way that is incredibly reminiscent of “The Sims” or “SimCity” videogames. In such systems, the difference between real people and “intelligent” soft automata blurs to the extent that the operator could actually be playing a game, instead of dealing with reality, and not be aware of it at all. The city—and its inhabitants—is seen as a machine to the point of becoming indistinguishable from an actual machine: a computer and its display. It is not the purpose of this paper to deny the potential usefulness of developments like these—though the obvious perplexities on the opportunity and possible distortions of such a strict control can arise—but just to point out how strong a certain perspective on urban environments is, and how strongly this is contributing to shaping our evolving “digital” city. The Accessible City of the Open Government This is becoming a widespread way of seeing the city and also of what a “digital” city can do for its inhabitants. From this perspective, citizens have a more important role, as they are seen as the potentially critical clients of the public administration, as well as the owners of a certain amount of shareable, relevant information and knowledge. The “open” digital city needs active users who are willing to engage in exchanging information, learning, debating, and publishing. The emphasis here is in actively encouraging usage of the digital urban systems, through a series of computer literacy initiatives, promotion of the systems themselves, and sometimes involvement of the general public—or more often selected community organizations—as information providers. In the past this has been achieved by offering free Internet space within the urban information system, and allowing people to publish in it. One of the leading ideas proper to this vision is that the local authority, or indeed any other single agency, does not own all the relevant information Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 19 about the city, and that local communities and individuals should be put in the picture as they can enrich the “contents” and the wisdom of the digital city and contribute to its improvement and usefulness. However, this is still in certain respects a government-centered vision. Although government tends to be “open” and sensitive to the diversity of inputs that can come from the users of the city, the ownership of the decision-making processes is kept firmly in the hands of one agency, or a restricted partnership. So, while the city is seen as diverse and heterogeneous when it comes to using ICT services and integrating vital information, the framework within which all of this can be done is kept quite rigid. Citizens are “advanced users,” or “information providers” in the most open scenarios. They have to be encouraged and trained to use and contribute to the new IT systems, so that they can benefit from this and get equipped better to participate in public life. What they cannot do is to contribute to the design of the system, and to set the framework and the types of services it will be offering. They are not even asked about it. Validation of ICT urban projects from the citizens has been seldom promoted by digital city entrepreneurs. Even in some virtuous cases— such as the Bologna civic network—when surveys have been carried out among the users of the information system (Bellagamba and Guidi, 1996), the quality of what was provided was audited, and users were asked to comment on the quality of information and services, but the definition of what the system should and should not be about still was a scarcely shared matter. Features and functionalities were pushed, not pulled, in response to explicit needs from the inhabitants. Most of the digital city services provided by even the most advanced and complex projects, are not the product of consultation with local communities, but rather the exploitation of EC funding opportunities in a certain area, and of the synergies between local authorities and the IT industry. Projects are conceived and developed, and then offered as a “final product” to the prospective citizens-users, hoping that they will participate actively in the adoption of the new technology. So, the diverse city that is supposed to contribute to the information held in its digital counterpart becomes homogeneous when its aspects, functions, and solutions are being conceived and designed. Evans et al., in their paper, refer to the “audited city” of progressive planning and highlight that “paradoxically the city, which was heterogeneous when being audited, is now to be persuaded by a single appeal to economic and technical efficiency, which recognizes none of this diversity” (Evans et al., 2001: 127). This reflects rather well what can be observed in digital city initiatives that are characterized by an “open government” approach. Evans et al. also note that “it is almost as if the authors [of the strategy review document for transport policy] underestimated the difficulty of forging new social networks and communities of interest, believing instead that providing information would promote change automatically” (Evans et al., 2001: 128). This lack of overall strategies towards the promotion of real and effective participation has been a problem noted also in observing the construction of the digital city, as involvement of citizens was taken for granted by relying exclusively on the deployment of new technologies, without considering the necessity for urban managers to 20 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 integrate these with locally focused, non hi-tech actions of consultation and promotion of dialogue (Aurigi, 1999: 43). The type of initiatives that get influenced by this vision tends to be based on the deterministic assumption that services and information will inevitably generate new community dynamics and participation. In order to do this, the key seems to be training and therefore constructing the users. Access barriers are seen as the only real hurdle towards the effective delivery of benefits from new urban technologies. Once citizens will overcome problems related to lack of money or education in IT, they will set the digital city alive. Conceiving the city—and the digital city—this way implies that what is perceived as the main problem for the success of technological innovation is the establishment of a critical mass of active users of whatever system or environment—virtual or hybrid—is being proposed. This has been the main concern in many cities involved in cyber-innovation. In Belgium, “Antwerp has to create access to this information” by providing cybercafes, “cyberbuses,” information booths, and kiosks (Peeters, 1999), while in Helsinki a parallel was drawn between the aim “to get above a critical mass of users” and the need “to offer them interesting services” by actually “pushing” them to this prospective audience (Linturi et al., 1999: 85). A document titled “The Hague in the Information Society” refers to the concept of a “democratic city,” with “greater involvement of citizens” just as a consequence of increased access to local computer networks (Boekwijt, 2000), while the perceived potential benefits of the “digital city” information system in Shanghai all tend to be derived from broadcasting and consumption of information, inducing “more democracy” that would supposedly be boosted by the chance given to citizens to write to the local authority with suggestions (Peng et al., 1999: 127). But this correlation between mass of users and benefits for the public sphere of contemporary cities has been difficult to prove, and in some cases it has been noted (Aurigi, 1999; Ranerup, 1999) that participation to “digital” public discourse has been much lower than expectations. Some re-thinking of the whole approach appears to be necessary. The Shared Cities of Communities When the civic network in Bologna was taking its first steps, in the mid 1990s, the main promoter and entrepreneur who had contributed to the conception and launch of this experiment had a clear vision of what the city was and needed: “My position stems from the fact that in a complex society it is extremely difficult to know how the system works, being able to take decisions.... Actually, even in Bologna the urban social system is far too complex for the administration to be able to satisfy people’s needs. There is a deficit of resources as well as knowledge. Is it then possible to run and administrate the city effectively? My answer is no, it is not possible unless we manage to cope with complexity, broadening our knowledge base and the number of those involved in decision-making. I am not referring to direct democracy, but rather to a broadening of representation. We increasingly need forms of self-repre- Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 21 sentation, and the Net can allow people to organize themselves beyond traditional structures like unions or certain associations. People can speak beyond traditional representation forms, and beyond differences in wealth and social status” (Bonaga, 1997). Although Stefano Bonaga, a local politician and an academic in Bologna University, would not go as far as envisaging a totally open process of shaping the civic network, and limit his expectations to an increase in public debate and representation, what his interpretation of the city suggests is that the digital city should be a “shared,” widely participated space. This third approach, which is still rare to encounter in digital city design, as well as in “real” city management, is in fact based on a postmodernist view of the city as a pluralist system that is far too complex to manage and plan centrally. In terms of local politics, this could be referred to as a governancebased, rather than government-based, vision or, as Evans et al. argue in their paper: “A reflexive city” (Evans et al., 2001: 129). The focus here is on sharing responsibility for what the shape of the digital city should be among many actors, rather than on trying to construct the users of a mainly pre-defined and centrally controlled set of urban digital systems and services. The emphasis, according to this perspective, has to move from the sharing of the contents, which is typical of the most advanced applications of the open government vision, to the sharing of the processes of design and configuration of urban technological systems. City government alone cannot have the capacity of shaping an effective, beneficial, and relevant digital city. It needs help. This involves an all-round participation of a wide range of local entrepreneurs, community groups, and individuals in identifying the issues that need to be addressed by the digital city initiatives and in driving the deployment of the appropriate technological solutions. In other words, this involves innovating at the institutional and policy-making level, transcending if necessary the existing limits imposed by legislation and conventional working practices. This kind of non-technological innovation is necessary to really make the technology as effective as it would be meant to be. It is also a fundamental requisite for the development of e-democracy tools that really can gain widespread support and validation from the citizens. The “shared” digital city does not just limit itself to acknowledging that citizens and local communities have information to provide or things to say within a certain pre-defined framework. It implies that the framework should not be pre-defined at all, that urban information systems should somehow be “fluid” and flexible, and that communities should be empowered to design their own digital city and prioritize its aims. Within this perspective, training efforts limited to organization of IT courses on “how to surf the Internet” show their limits, as a much more all-round effort to involve communities in consultations and decision-making processes would be required. It has to be acknowledged that we cannot assume that the “shared” digital city represents a guarantee of improved public participation, and that citizens will want to be engaged anyway, or in what way they will end up engaging. 22 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 An all-round effort to promote participatory processes is going to be needed badly in the “digital” city. Electronic initiatives for regeneration and participation should work in parallel with “traditional” ones within re-combined strategies for urban development (Aurigi, 1999: 42-43). However, it is worth mentioning some attempts that have been made to approach digital city-making from this “shared” perspective. Interesting, for instance is the “Imagine” project, an EC-funded initiative under TAP (Telematics Application Programme), which in the late 1990s aimed at creating highly participatory civic networks. “Imagine” was actively trying to “Integrate the applications in four European towns which have been considered as a priority by the citizens themselves,” and “put the user at the heart of the service development and involve the users at all stages of the project” (Biolghini and Cengarle, 1999: 2). Interestingly, when participation to the shaping process, and not just to the content creation, is seek, social science research becomes a fundamental underpinning element of the construction of the initiative, as exclusively technocratic approaches would show their limits in reaching and interpreting people’s needs, and managing to envisage strategies to involve a much wider range of actors. In fact, Imagine’s process would stem from a detailed survey of citizens’ needs, expectations as well as perplexities and resistance, related to the emergence of urban digital information, service, and communication facilities. How Visions Changed the Digital City Though a simplification is always possible, and different projects could be categorized as stemming from exclusively one “view” or another, research seems to suggest that this is rarely the case, and multiple interpretations of the city coexist, often competing, as their articulation—and tensions—dynamically give shape to the digital city. The problem seems to be that this phenomenon is seldom considered, and its consequences explored, by the practitioners designing and running the new technological initiatives. Both in Bologna and Bristol, for instance, Iperbole and Digital City Bristol Interactive (DCBI) were born out of an approach which was very close to the “shared city” vision, with Stefano Bonaga in Bologna and Erik Geelhoed in Bristol being the main “visionary” ideologists and entrepreneurs who had started the process. References to the powerful concepts of “virtual community” and civic networking, to issues of self-representation of the citizens and local communities, to the potential for debate and public participation and two-way communication of these embryonic digital cities, and to the ability of new technologies to regenerate local economies from the bottom up, were often made in the promotional literature of the initiatives. These powerful concepts were also providing a strong symbolic political message—in terms of technologies facilitating local social cohesion and renaissance—that made the initiatives appealing to local politicians, and gained them a widespread support. As things developed in the first two to three years of the initiatives’ lives, the interpretative arena of both projects got more complex and quite different from the initial one, and started relying on visions closer to the “open govern- Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 23 ment” and the “machine-city,” which were becoming more and more central, and literally transforming the character of the “digital city.” New actors participating with their own conceptions and expectations meant that Iperbole would quickly shift its focus towards an “open government” and advanced service distribution facility, drawing its character partly from the second “view” proposed here, and partly from the more mechanistic first vision. Similarly, with the growing involvement of more actors bringing in a different outlook, Digital Bristol would lose its “Interactive” definition, never managing to develop the two-way, public discourse enabling facilities that had seemed to constitute its initial aim, and getting closer to an Internet “broadcasting” service used by a limited number of agencies and institutions that were enabled to try and reach the population, conceived more and more as “audience.” This paradigmatic shift made of it another information portal—rather globally oriented—for the city of Bristol (Aurigi, 2003). And this phenomenon seems to have been a rather general trend, as suggested by scholars from Insubria and Milan Universities who have been looking at the history of Italian civic networks: “In most cases the ‘pioneer’ spirit of civic networks gets lost: in Italy, this change is consistent with a corresponding change in the political climate where the participation issues of the second half of the ‘90s almost disappears: people are more and more seen as an user of ICT applications or as a consumer of on-line services, while it should be recalled that citizens own a sovereignty right that should allow them to contribute in shaping the Information Society” (Benini et al., 2003, original emphasis). It is also interesting to notice that in many experiences, while these changes were already well underway, and the development trajectories of these early experiments were taking a definite turn towards different conceptions of ICT use in the city, the underlying claims present in websites and literature seemed rather unchanged. It looked like as if the initial, powerful ideologies would resist somehow, though more on paper than in real life. Digital City Bristol for example would still be presented in 2001 as aiming to become “A virtual meeting place and an electronic communication network for the City of Bristol” (Digital City Bristol, 2001). This was being claimed at a time when the views of the city —and the digital city—had become rather incompatible with a “shared city” perspective, or at least certainly not focused in that direction. I would argue that this tends to happen because we, too often, look at the relationship between city and technology in a deterministic way, assuming that it will be technology that will impact—and change—the city and the ways we look at it. Therefore, even if current attitudes towards city planning and management suggest that the digital city is being looked at through a certain “lens,” it is hoped that innovation will take over and modify that view, and its effects. These examples seem to prove the opposite: that the power of our visions is at least equal to that of technology, and that the relative dominance of one view over others is capable to affect the shaping of even the most “innovative” of the initiatives. When we think inside a certain interpretative “box,” the electronically augmented urban environment we are going to deal with will belong to that box anyway. 24 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005 Conclusions Many European cities are dedicating some of their R&D efforts to retrofit their urban spaces with innovative electronic tools for information and service provision which, together with the general ubiquity of computing and the Internet, are increasingly making the city “digital.” These processes seem to be driven by technological developments as well as sociopolitical agendas and planning practice, and their underpinning “views” of what the city is or should be. What seems to happen often is that while our cities are gradually becoming more complex, multi-cultural and fragmented, the “innovative” services that are superimposed on them look pretty indifferent to all of this, and derive their shape by a conception of the city which is more governmentcentred, mechanistic, and technocratic. Most digital cities fail to address some of the main problems that their physical counterparts have, opting for easier things to do such as electronic certifications or telematics payment of parking spaces. This also implies that very often public discourse fails to be enhanced by the electronic urban tools, even when this was meant to be one of the main benefits of the digital city. However, the purpose of this paper is not that of labeling projects in one way or another—as the history of many of these initiatives is likely to be characterized by a mix of approaches—or to categorize digital city approaches in order to recognize “best practice” examples. “Best practice” is always a relative concept, which depends on what aims a series of projects is supposed to achieve, how it is supposed to achieve them, and within what context and constraints. What this paper can suggest, instead, is how important it can be to move from a perspective based on the presence or absence of the implementation of new technologies in a city, to a more sophisticated analysis of how those technologies are designed, conceived, deployed and managed, and what interpretations lay behind them. As Guthrie and Dutton argued over ten years ago, “Like policy, technology is a social construction.... However, in the case of technology, these policy choices too often are obscured or overlooked because people focus only on decisions about the adoption or non adoption of a technology rather than also attending to decisions about design and implementation of the technology that influence its use and impact” (Guthrie and Dutton, 1992: 575). As noted here, we might believe that we are thinking out of the box because we are implementing something “innovative.” However, our pre-defined views and interpretations of the city and the relevance and role of several urban actors will influence the shaping of the “new”—yet ridden of “old” problems—digital environment. I would like to argue that we should therefore pay more attention to our changing and competing visions of the city, and the paradigms that come with them, when we are involved in implementing and managing urban electronic innovation. Strategy-making for the design and deployment of the “digital” city needs a constant awareness of the underlying non-technical components that are going to affect the type of initiatives we create, as well as the overall context within which these will have to function and interact with the other many aspects of urban life. Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City 25 Urban technology projects do not necessarily evolve as linearly as it would seem, even from within the cohort of actors who set them up and run them. They seem to be subject to an interaction—and potential conflict—of different visions that change their aims and potential subtly but substantially, and affect the ways we think in terms of information, knowledge and wisdom of the place, who owns them, who should handle them. “Digital” cities need steering, and this is not just a matter of deciding what to do but above all how, and why. This process can be helped by an active involvement of social research, run in parallel to the deployment and technical development of the initiatives. This can prove invaluable for the “strategic” steering that the digital city in which we are all living needs in order to become more meaningful, inclusive, and actually useful. References Aurigi, A. (1999). “Digital City or Urban Simulator?,” in Ishida and Isbister (eds), Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences and Future Perspectives, LNCS, Berlin Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Aurigi, A. (2003). The First Steps of Digital Cities: Development and Social Shaping of Web-based Urban Cyberspace in Europe, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Aurigi, A. and Graham, S. (2000). “Cyberspace and the City: The ‘Virtual City’ in Europe,” in Bridge, G. and Watson, S. (eds), A Companion to the City, Oxford: Blackwell. Bellagamba, F. and Guidi, L. (1996). “Citycard Second Phase—WP4: CityCard System Prototypes and Validation (III). 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(1999) “Digital City Shanghai: Towards Integrated Information and Service Environment,” in Ishida and Isbister (eds) Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences and Future Perspectives, LNCS, Berlin Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Polzonetti A. and De Simone S. (1998). “The Province of Macerata: The Diffuse Digital City,” in European Digital Cities—4th Conference: Changing Patterns of Urban Life—Proceedings, European Digital Cities EC DG XIII-C. Ranerup A. (1999). “On-Line Forums as an Arena for Political Discussion,” in Ishida and Isbister (Eds) Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences and Future Perspectives, LNCS, Berlin Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Tarumi, H., Tada, Y., Kazuya, M., Tokuda, S., Morita, T., Sasaki, I., and Kagawa, K. (2003) “MRbased Virtual City with 3DSpaceTag,” paper presented at the Digital Cities 3 Workshop, Communities and Technologies conference, Amsterdam. Van Bastelaer, B. and Lobet-Maris, C. (1999) “Social Learning Regarding Multimedia Developments at a Local Level. The Case of Digital Cities,” TSER-SLIM Final Version of the Integrated Study on the Public Sector, CITA-FUNDP, University of Namur. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access Date of publication xxxx 00, 0000, date of current version xxxx 00, 0000. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.Doi Number Improving Urban Mobility by Defining a Smart Data Integration Platform P. Cáceres1, A. Sierra-Alonso1, C.E. Cuesta1, B. Vela1, and J.M. Cavero1 1 Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, C/ Tulipán s/n, 28933 Móstoles (Madrid) SPAIN. Corresponding author: P. Cáceres (e-mail: paloma.caceres@urjc.es). This work has been partially supported by the Access@City research project (TIN2016-78103-C2-1-R), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. ABSTRACT One of the key factors employed to define the well-being of citizens in the urban environment is mobility, since it defines a set of flows and connections that constrain those citizens’ individual and collective behaviour. However, the complexity of this activity on the scale of a city makes this a complex problem in computational terms. One of the main reasons for this is the asymmetry of information: different actors have access only to partial or outdated information, and many relevant data are simply unavailable. In this paper, we propose a data integration architecture and platform with which to combine relevant data from many different sources and provide the results in a variety of forms. This integration uses semantic technologies, thus ensuring that the relationships among data show their actual meaning and are appropriately interpreted. The resulting platform amalgamates: open data, which is available from public sources; extracted data, obtained from public sites by means of scraping techniques; pre-processed data, stored in public databases; aggregated data, acquired from pervasive devices by means of crowdsourcing; smart data, supplied by mobile applications and enriched with contextual information, or data concerning specific incidents, often provided by the users themselves. The semantic integration of this information makes it possible to compute a wide range of results, from accessible transport routes to identifiable events, in a coordinated manner. The general public is then supplied with these results through the use of specific software, via either mobile applications or the web. We are of the opinion that the collective use of this information may improve urban welfare. INDEX TERMS Crowdsourcing, Data Acquisition, Data Processing, Open Data, Pervasive Computing, Semantics, Smart Data, Social Computing, Software Architecture, Urban Mobility I. INTRODUCTION The concept of the smart city implies the notion of a better city: one in which data is gathered in order to learn about the problems in that city and decide upon potential solutions to them; one in which there are fewer disruptions, the citizens’ lives are improved, and their experience is enhanced – in summary, a city whose inhabitants’ well-being increases. The urban landscape is a highly complex ecosystem and can easily degenerate into a hostile environment; as this complexity grows, the general public is beginning to rely on technology to make it evolve in the right direction. This is, allegedly, the actual purpose of smart cities: using technology to solve the challenges of the evolving urban space, and applying software solutions in order to tackle both large-scale issues and small-scale concerns. One of the key factors is urban mobility: the way in which people move through the city defines their perception of the environment, the concentration of the population and the interferences and interactions among individuals; in short, it is the framework that delimits their behaviour. Urban mobility is delimited by the combination of pedestrian routes, private transport and public transport. The first is mostly relevant over short distances, while the second cannot be controlled but only restricted. Public transport is, however, the backbone that defines the flows of people and goods within a living city. An appropriate regulation of public transport has direct consequences as regards improving citizens’ welfare – and in this case, the notion of welfare must be understood in the most general sense, not limited to (but including) the economic perspective. VOLUME XX, 2017 1 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access The use of public transport, as opposed to private transport, provides great advantages in terms of the entire urban community‘s well-being. On the one hand, traffic jams, energy consumption and carbon emissions are reduced. On the other, new parking infrastructures are not necessary, which allows the construction of new pedestrian spaces, such as parks and recreation areas, in their place. Any means employed to increase the use of public transport and improve its efficiency have a positive effect on the whole system. Much of the current research on smart cities has been related to cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, and much of it has, therefore, had to deal with hardware issues. However, the smartness of the city is, in reality, provided by the software that processes the data captured by that hardware. Indeed, on the scale of a city, the actual issue is that of capturing all kinds of information in different data streams, synchronizing them, processing them, and performing the corresponding analyses in order to learn about the current situation of the city, even in real time, and decide which actions would serve to improve that situation. In this context, rather than isolated efforts to process separate fragments, an integral approach is relevant and required. The data context of the city is defined by both stable information and a dynamic status. The first of these provides structure, which can be recovered from conventional databases and includes data concerning the city itself, the means of transport and the combined routes they define. The second comprises variable data streams obtained from different sources, and includes information regarding unexpected events, temporary barriers, accidents and incidents, or simply the flow of individuals within the city at a particular moment: collapsed streets, traffic jams or public demonstrations. Many proposals concentrate their efforts on finding routes within the stable structure, without considering the critical influence of temporary obstacles; and of course, the influence of a certain event cannot be estimated without considering the remaining data. Both aspects of this information are, therefore, relevant, and both must be considered in a coordinated manner, even when considering synchronization; e.g. an accident may cause a traffic jam, but several hours later, this is no longer relevant; a multitude might cause a standstill, but an alternative route could provide a detour around it. When dealing with a dynamic status, the timing is as relevant as the place itself. Moreover, there is an enormous variety of information sources. Apart from the abovementioned emphasis on sensor-oriented computation and IoT devices, there are many other options. First, it is necessary to consider that any smart city initiative also places emphasis on transparency and on the publishing of open data concerning the city itself. These open data sources (many of which employ a form of processable Linked Open Data ) may vary in their approach, ranging from an automatic data stream, perhaps originating from a physical sensor, to more elaborate and even preprocessed data sources, such as the periodic emission of structured data files concerning, e.g. the pollution levels in the city. Second, many other sources, which provide information in the form of an accessible API (application programme interface), are not exactly considered part of an open data initiative but share much of its philosophy. Third, the largest potential source of information is probably not even these initiatives, but rather the presence of computational devices throughout the city, that is, the citizens’ smartphones (and other smart devices) with their many sensors and their huge computational capabilities. If adequate software is employed, these smartphones can be the means to both capture and even pre-process information that is not accessible in any other form, and provide the smart city’s inhabitants with the processed information in a useful form. This implication of the citizens themselves in the building of the smart city not only defines a way in which to extend the “sensor network” in that city, but also creates a crowdsourcing endeavour, which may take many different forms, and in which each new software application in fact embodies a different conception. It could even be argued that this crowdsourcing approach is required for the success of any smart city initiative, and it should be considered as an essential part of any complex urban computing approach. Fourth, and finally, there are the considerable number large databases that store all the stable information mentioned above, and this information is the basic mainstay of the city’s information processing system. Coordinating all of these sources of information is highly complex, and in many situations goes beyond what a computational system can deal with and enters the scope of the so-called “big data” initiatives. Nevertheless, the integration of even a small part of these data may have a huge impact on the well-being of the individuals affected. Even partial improvements can have very significant consequences. It is for this reason that our work proposes:  A data integration architecture and platform, on which all the data from the different sources are stored, semantically annotated and harmonised, thus ensuring a feature-rich integration; and  A set of specific and focused software applications designed for both smartphones and the web that can solve specific issues (accessibility, incidents and infrastructure) one at a time. We intend to provide a generic architecture so as to support data integration on an urban computing platform. This will lay the foundations for many different applications, each of which will be designed in order to improve the wellbeing of urban citizens and to enrich the platform itself, thereby allowing more sophisticated decisions to be made. The key aspect as regards providing this generic integration is the use of semantic technologies. The main contributions of our work in addition to the Services on the move for Urban mobility (SofUR) platform are, therefore, the following: VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access  A Services on the Move Architecture (SoMA), which is structured in three following different subsystems: o An Open Data & Acquisition subsystem, which obtains data from the open and public sources. o A Semantic subsystem, which processes and integrates data and then transforms them into semantic data by using our domain-specific MAnto ontology. o A Smart Data subsystem, which gathers smart data concerning public transport and its accessibility by using various apps developed for this purpose.  A suite of applications that offer urban services to citizens with the aim of putting mobility in the city on the move. This suite is divided into the two following groups o The suite of mobile applications, which is a set of mobility applications designed for mobile devices. o The suite of Web applications, which supplies information services to data consumers, who will use those data according to their needs or convenience, and which also offers mobility services on the Internet. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 shows a review and discussion of some similar proposals, while Section 3 provides a summary of the different technologies used throughout this work and related efforts. A detailed description of the structure of our proposal (the Services on the move for Urbanmobility –SofUR- platform and the underlying SoMaarchitecture) is then shown in Section 4, which also includes an inclusive enumeration of the associated suite of applications. Section 5 illustrates how these applications prove the validity of the proposa, in addition to providing our conclusions and an initial account of some future work. II. RELATED WORK In this section, we discuss some of the most representative software approaches employed to improve citizens’ wellbeing as regards urban mobility. Firstly, we examine how, within the framework of smart cities, urban mobility is considered to be one of the factors affecting that well-being. The term smart city has been used for over two decades [3]. Numerous definitions have been proposed during this period; however, while they have commonalities, they also differ in some respects. Choubariet al [27] and Albino et al [3] present a compilation of these definitions. Some authors consider that the defining characteristic of a smart city is the use of ICTs when applied to citizens' daily lives [43][44][82]. This implies that it is necessary to collect data by means of sensors, meters, appliances, personal devices, or similar, in order to later integrate them and, through their use, provide citizens with services and assist them to make informed decisions. But a different trend has recently appeared, which claims that other relevant aspects are required in order to consider a city as a smart city. Of the definitions mentioned above [27][3], some include not only ICTs, but also aspects such as sustainability and liveability. There is currently a tendency to consider that a multidisciplinary approach is required [53] in order to make the transition to a smart city. In this respect, several authors have drawn up lists of dimensions in order to determine which aspects actually constitute a smart city [27][3][40][60][54]. Although each list contains different dimensions, there are several in common, such as people (human), social aspects, the economy, mobility, quality of life or the natural environment and technology. Within the framework of smart cities and in line with the objective of improving the quality of citizens’ lives, it is worth emphasizing the need to improve urban mobility, as mentioned in the introduction. In their definition of a smart city, Giffinger et al [40] mention mobility as a basic element to be taken into account during its construction. Washburn et al [82] also confirm the need to make services such as transport more efficient, and this is directly related to citizens’ mobility. Albino et al [3] state that "high-quality and more efficient public transport that responds to economic needs and connects labour with employment is considered a key element for city growth". Lombardi et al. [51] also opine that smart mobility is a basic component of a smart city. Indeed, urban mobility has, in recent years, become an object of study in an attempt to improve it in order to increase citizens’ well-being [77]. One of the main aspects of this well-being is public transport. The European Union has funded numerous projects in order to address this issue [35][1]. These projects develop infrastructures with which to improve public transport and make it more comfortable and more accessible to all, and they incorporate the use of information technologies (IT) to make public transport more efficient and effective and to ensure that its use is a more pleasant experience. In this last respect, several software applications have been developed that inform users about the public transport network and how to use it. These applications provide information about the lines, stops, accesses, etc. of the different means of public transport. Almost all of them provide the user with the possibility of requesting a route (optimal in terms of time or distance) from an origin point to a destination point. In some cases, they include information about accessibility features, or elements for people with special needs or disabilities. When considering the importance that people and social aspects acquire in the general context and conception of smart cities, it should not be forgotten that an essential feature must be the inclusion of all social groups by overcoming barriers of language, culture, education and disabilities [3][53]. Taking accessibility into account is, therefore, essential if people with special needs are to be provided with a good experience as regards the use of public transport. Several pieces of software use crowdsourcing to gather data about public transport. The information collected is then made available VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access to other users in order to improve the responses that citizens attain from these applications. Those applications that take aspects of accessibility into account usually focus on a particular type of impairment or group of people. Wheelmate [84] or WheelMap [83] consequently provide information regarding wheelchair accessibility for many places in 45 countries. In addition, users can modify the degree of accessibility of registered places or mark new ones. Cardonha et al. [23] have developed an application that enables users to incorporate accessibility information so as to collaborate in the creation of accessibility maps. Access Map [1] helps people with mobility needs to plan an accessible route in the city of Seattle. These applications consider only mobility limitations. Others, such as Landmark Ontology for Hiking [71], are intended for elderly people. In this case, the application aids them to walk less when hiking. There are also applications that consider other types of special needs, one of which is “CiudadesPatrimonio de la Humanidad” [15], a web application that provides accessibility information concerning tourist routes in World Heritage cities. This information refers to mobility needs, in addition to others related to vision and hearing. These applications are not, however, generally customisable: their users can establish the place to which they wish to go, but cannot establish what their accessibility needs are. As stated above, the European Union is making a great effort to improve public transport [35], and it is necessary to highlight two projects that focus on the use of IT to improve mobility on urban public transport: ACCESS 2 ALL [2] and Mediate [55]. ACCESS 2 ALL exhaustively analyses users’ possible needs with respect to public transport. By taking these needs into account, it establishes guidelines to ensure that urban public transport is accessible to all citizens. Moreover, it proposes customised services for route guidance. The Mediate Project [52] has identified a set of measures with which to describe the degree of accessibility of a particular means of transport and has developed an application with which to quantify it. Another result of Mediate Project has been a Good Practice Guide for accessibility. These two projects seek to establish a theoretical framework that will cover all aspects of citizens’ mobility, but do not provide solutions in the form of user applications. Another aspect that qualifies smart mobility is the use of data [47]. In order to achieve actual smart mobility, services have to rely on a lot of information: not only a certain amount of data, but also a significant amount of variety. For effective mobility, these data must be up-to-date, and in many cases, real-time information is required. A paradigmatic example is the communication of incidents in the public transport network. If an application calculates an accessibility route, but, for example, the recommended lift does not work, then the route is not useful for the user. In order to obtain this information in real time, it is possible to take advantage of the widespread use of smartphones and encourage the users themselves to provide pieces of this incident information when they encounter them. This is referred to as crowdsourcing. There are also applications that use crowdsourcing to improve urban public transport. For example, Tiramisu Transit [85] tells the user whether there is room left for a wheelchair on a bus or how full that bus is. Moovit [59], meanwhile, provides information about the status of each service, calculates routes and indicates when to get off. The OneBusAway [33] project consists of a set of tools whose intention is, among other goals, to comply with the bus schedules or to decrease waiting times in order to increase well-being on urban public transport. This objective can be extended to other transit systems. In addition, OneBusAway permits users to make comments about these tools. Swiftly [75] provides more accurate vehicle arrival data for transport agencies, thus enabling them to provide their users with better information and allow them to better plan their journeys. Other initiatives that use crowdsourcing are the BUSUP project [14] and the CIVITAS initiative [24]. The former allows users to book crowdsourced buses on demand, while CIVITAS is an initiative from the EU to promote a new urban mobility culture. One of its mobility strategies includes safe and secure transport for all users, taking into account a variety of needs [35]. In the CIVITAS initiative, several pilot projects are being deployed in European cities to test new accessibility concepts, such as smart access facilities for wheelchairs [35]. OpenTripPlanner (OTP) [63] is a project that calculates routes combining different transit systems, including bicycles and walking routes, and takes (transport) accessibility into account. OTP obtains data from OpenStreetMap [64] and GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) feeds [41]. As will be noted, there are numerous approaches with which to improve users’ well-being when they use urban public transport. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them considers the calculation of routes by taking the accessibility features for any type of need into account or maintains real time data concerning temporary incidents (a lift does not work, there is work taking place that hinders blind people, etc.) in the public transport network. It is now necessary to discuss the need for data with which to provide intelligent urban public transport. These data originate from heterogeneous sources, including data scattered on the Web in several formats or data originating from portable devices (e.g., smartphones) [50]. In order to obtain greater benefit from existing data, they should be published in a coordinated manner, harmonised and linked, thus uniting the efforts of public and private initiatives. The management, maintenance and publication of data have, therefore, become a growing challenge. Several initiatives have, however, been set up to meet this challenge, some of which consist of governmental data portals based on CKAN [25]. CKAN is a data management system that facilitates the publishing and sharing of data. Other works present platforms on which to manage, link or publish data from different sources, e.g., QuerioCity [52], AECIS [36], the VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access proposal by Bischof et al. [12] or ATIS [7]. Some proposals develop more comprehensive frameworks covering several stages of the data publication process, such as Santos et al.’s process [70], the VIVO approach [81], the linked data platform LinkedLab [30], the CITIESData framework [50] or CityPulse [65]. All of them handle data from different domains, but none of them focuses on public transport data and less still on the accessibility of public transport. Several works can also be found in the domain of urban public transport. The proposal by Schlingensiepen et al. consists of designing a framework for autonomic transport in the smart city environment, but it is for transport in general [72]. Ning et al. present a control system for urban rail based on artificial systems, considering human factors in order to improve the experience during the use of urban rail, but it is not intended to allow users to personalise the use of the data [61]. However, Lau and Ismail’s framework employs a crowdsourcing approach to provide passengers with real time data in order to meet their needs [49]. But once again, nothing about accessibility is mentioned. We can conclude that there are many works in the area of smart technologies whose objective is to improve urban mobility so as to increase the well-being of citizens, but that there is still much to be done, especially as regards accessibility, if urban mobility is to be accessible to all. Table 1 summarises the related work. This table presents the issues analysed in this work in order to improve urban mobility and, therefore, the well-being of the citizens in the context of intelligent cities. Definition and characterization of smart cities Definition of dimensions in order to characterise a smart city Urban mobility as a factor in the wellbeing of the citizens in a smart city The role of public transport in urban mobility Albino et al. [3] Choubari et al. [27] Hall [43] Harrison et al. [44] Lytras and Visvizi[53] Washburn et al. [82] Albino et al. [3] Choubari et al. [27] Giffinger et al. [40] Lytras, Visvizi and Sarirete[54][53] Nam and Pardo [60] Albino et al. [3] Giffinger et al. [40] Lombardi et al. [51] Washburn et al. [82] Tomaszewska and Florea[77] Accessmap. [Online]. Available: https://www.accessmap.io.[1] Gaggi,Fluhrer and T. Janitzek [35] Accessmap. [Online]. Available: https://www.accessmap.io.[1] ICT applications with which to improve the experience of using public transport Access2All [2] Ciudades Patrimonio [15] Cardonha et al. [23] Mediate [55] OpenTripPlanner[63] Sarjakoski et al. [71] Wheelmap[83] Wheelmate[84] Collection (crowdsourcing) The need for data in order to provide intelligent urban mobility Publication and harmonization BUSUP [14] CIVITAS [24] Ferris et al. [33] Lau and Ismail [49] Swiftly [75] Zimmermanet al. [85] Bischof et al. [12] CKAN ¡Error! No se encuentra el origen de la referencia. Darari et al. [30] Gandon et al.[36] Liu et al. [50] López et al. [52] Puiu et al. [65] Santos et al. [70] VIVO [81] TABLE 1. Related work classified by issues related to urban mobility in smart cities III. RELATED TECHNOLOGIES The work described herein was carried out using various technologies. The most important technologies used to gather and harmonise data and to develop the server are described below. A. WEB SCRAPING Data are scattered on the Web, distributed on many different sites. Furthermore, they have different formats that are structured to a greater or lesser extent. Data can appear as plain text or organised in html tables. It is possible to download files containing data in XML or JSON format or to invoke APIs that also provide files containing data in those or other formats. For these data to be useful, they have to be collected, related to each other and given a common format. Web scraping solves that need by obtaining data from the Internet. It consists of gathering data automatically (from the Internet) by using programmes (denominated as bots or scrapers) that query a web server, request data, parse those data to extract the information required and store them for their later use [57]. There is a variety of programming techniques, programming languages and libraries with which to attain the data distributed on the web. One of these languages is Python [65]. Several modules can be used to programme a scraper. Three of the most frequently used are [42]: - The requests library [69], which is a wrapper over the urllib Python library whose goal is to handle the HTTP requests. Its use is recommended by the Python 3 documentation, since it is friendlier than urllib [67]. - The Beautiful Soup library [9] helps to extract the information of interest from HTML or XML files. It can be used with different parsers depending on the VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access format to be analysed. This library provides a function that creates a tree from the HTML or XML file. Each node in this tree contains a tag. These tags, which contain the information of interest, are searched by means of other functions, also provided by the library. Once the tag is located in the tree, its contents are extracted. - Scrapy [73] is a more powerful framework than Beautiful Soup and can be scaled, but is more difficult to use. Scrapy [48] is an open source framework with which to extract data from websites using XPath [26]. It offers the tools for the efficient extraction of unstructured data that are scattered throughout the web, their processing and their storage in the structure and format required [48]. Scraped data are integrated using several formats, mainly XML, JSON or CSV. B. SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES In this subsection, we introduce the various semantic technologies that are necessary to understand our work. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a model for data interchange on the Web [68]. In the RDF, data are described as a set of triples. A triple is formed of three components: a subject, a predicate and an object. The subject is a resource that is related to an object by means of a predicate. The object can be another resource or a literal. The predicate can describe a relationship between the subject and object or a property of the subject [29]. In order for the data of which the triples are formed to be referenced, the RDF identifies each component of the triple with a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) [11]. The set of triples can be represented graphically as a graph (an RDF Graph) on which subjects and objects are nodes and predicates are represented with edges. For all the users of that data to be able to interpret the predicate in the same way, the use of standard vocabularies is recommended, since they will allow the definition of the predicates of the triples. Finally, the RDF graph is serialised to enable computers to handle data. One of the most frequently used notations is RDF-XML [36], which is based on an XML format, while SPARQL is used to recover data from an RDF model [62]. SPARQL is an RDF graph query language that has been standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [62]. The use of SPARQL allows the definition of queries, which search for data in the RDF graph that satisfy the conditions of that query. It is a key technology in the development of the semantic web, since the data structured in RDF format could not otherwise be accessed. A SPARQL query recoveries RDF sentences, that is, triples. As with SQL, it is necessary to distinguish between the query language and the engine for data storage and retrieval. There are consequently several implementations of SPARQL that are generally linked to different technologies. One of these implementations is Apache FUSEKI [34], which forms part of the Apache Jena project. It is a SPARQL server and provides the means to recover and update data from a JENA repository using SPARQL. Apache JENA [4] is a free and open source Java framework that is employed to build applications and which accesses the Semantic Web and Linked Data. JENA is used to define an RDFS [13] so as to describe the underlying relationships that exist between data on the RDF graph. JENA provides a set of functions and services in which to store, extract and publish data as RDF triples that comply with the RDF schema. RML (the RDF Mapping Language) is a general language that permits the definition of rules with which to map heterogeneous data sources onto RDF graphs [31]. Mapping rules are defined in order to transform data from, for example, XML, JSON and CSV formats into the RDF. The rules expressed by means of RML transform heterogeneous data structures into an RDF data model. These rules transform the data format by defining new triples, semantically annotated with the vocabularies (ontologies) specific to the data domain, and integrate those triples into RDF graphs already defined in the same domain. The rules can be defined from any data source, in formats as diverse as CSV, HTML, XML, or even a format similar to that of relational databases. The result of applying the rules is a set of RDF triplets that uses the predicates and vocabulary types of the domain. C. DATA PROCESSING TECHNOLOGIES In this subsection, we introduce the various technologies related to our proposal. Apache Kafka [5] is a stream-processing software platform. It implements a “publish/subscribe” message system, is scalable and distributed and provides a valuable platform on which to process streaming data between applications. Apache NiFi [6] is an easy-to-use, powerful and reliable system with which to process and distribute data. It makes it possible to automate the movement of data between different systems quickly, easily and securely. It can load data from different sources, and has a very powerful web interface that allows its users to visually design the data flow, act on the process and monitor that process. MongoDB [58] is a scalable, flexible and distributed document database. It stores data in JSON-like documents, thus making data integration easier and faster. Searches can be carried out by means of fields, range queries, regular expressions or JavaScript functions. It supports field indexing and real time aggregation. MongoDB provides great availability in the form of replica sets. It can run on multiple servers, and balances the load or duplicates data in order to keep the system up and running in the case of failure. C. WEB INTEGRATION TECHNOLOGY In this subsection, we introduce the various technologies that are necessary for web integration. VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access Spring Boot [74] is a framework that is used to develop applications in Java. It provides a set of tools in order to configure and programme applications on any platform. The use of Spring Boot allows the programmer to focus only on the solution and forget about the complex tasks of configuration in terms of data access, security, communications, etc. Apache Tomcat [7] is open source software that permits web applications to be deployed in an integrated manner by sharing the same subsystem. Some of our applications are directly run on top of Tomcat and do not, in these cases, employ Spring. IV. SERVICES ON THE MOVE FOR URBAN MOBILITY As stated in the related work section, several solutions regarding how to deal with these issues already exist but, to the best our knowledge, there is no comprehensive solution that solves most of the known problems from a single perspective. Our Services on the move for Urban mobility (SofUR) platform defines a set of services whose objective is to improve the mobility of all the citizens in a city by promoting the use of public transport. This results in an improved quality of life and welfare in cities with regard to air quality, the flow of traffic, etc. We have, therefore, developed a service-based architecture and a suite of software applications, which together comprise the aforementioned platform. The Services on the Move Architecture (SoMA) is structured in three different subsystems that carry out acquisition, processing and integrating activities with data obtained from crowdsourcing, public and opensources and that provide enriched information in the form of semantic data. The suite of software applications offers different urban mobility information services obtained from these semantic data for both citizens and data consumers and, in some cases, also provides smart data by means of crowdsourcing techniques. In the following subsections, we first describe the Services on the Move architecture, after which we specify the different subsystems in which our proposal is structured. Finally, we present the suite of applications developed that offers a set of services to citizens and data consumers in order to improve public transport users’ well-being. A. SERVICES ON THE MOVE ARCHITECTURE As mentioned above, this work is being developed with the aim of providing public transport and its corresponding accessibility information. We, therefore, acquire data concerning public transport from different open and public sources, after which we process the data obtained. We then integrate and enrich them, and finally, we transform these data into semantic data. In order to carry out these activities, we have designed an extensible structure, the Services on the Move Architecture (SoMA), which is composed of three subsystems. The first, denominated as the Open Data & Acquisition subsystem, is responsible for obtaining data from the open and public sources, while the second, the Semantic subsystem, processes and integrates data and then transforms them into semantic data by using our domain-specific MAnto ontology. The third, denominated as the Smart Data subsystem, gathers smart data concerning public transport and its accessibility by using various apps developed for this purpose, and those data are then sent to the Semantic subsystem in order to transform them into semantic data. Fig. 1 shows the general structure of the SofUR proposal and, within it, our SoMAarchitecture, in which the abovementioned subsystems are represented. Each of these subsystems will be explained in greater detail in subsections B, C and D. The figure also includes the suite of apps (mobility and web apps), which will be explained in subsection E, and which are an integral part of the SofUR platform. FIGURE 1. SofUR Platform. B. OPEN DATA & ACQUISITION SUBSYSTEM The Open Data & Acquisition (ODA) subsystem is responsible for processing information obtained from public sources and open data related to the public transport infrastructure and its corresponding accessibility features. Fig. 2 shows the details of this subsystem. The first kinds of sources are public information sources, in which interesting public transport data are usually scattered on the Web and distributed on many different sites. All these data are collected through the use of web scraping techniques and we have, therefore, programmed several scrapers using the Python language. The Scrapy [73] and Beautiful Soup [9] libraries, mentioned above, are used to access the websites, and to seek and extract data of interest. We focus on the data extraction and processing of the existing information on the web concerning public transport, along with its accessibility, by means of a method for the semi-automatic generation of a VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access data scraper for the public transport domain. This method allows the extraction of public transport data and the existing accessibility information from a selected website. Moreover, we have developed a web tool that applies the aforementioned method in order to generate a data scraper for the public transport domain [80]. The data collected are organised and related according to an underlying domain model, in this case a public transport domain model, which was described in detail in [80]. Finally, we convert them into a structured data file with a common format (usually JSON or CSV) and these files are transferred to the Semantic Subsystem. subsystems, converting them into RDF graphs by means of programmatic (Java) processing or, more recently, RML transformations, and then storing them in the Jena repository. The Jena repository is a single repository, but it stores two different data collections: the public transport & accessibility collection and the incidents collection. Details of the SEM subsystem are provided in Fig. 3. FIGURE 3. Semantic Subsystem. FIGURE 2. Open Data & Acquisition Subsystem. The second kinds of sources are open data sources, which provide open access to public transport data, either through an API service, or by directly downloading data files. Each source provides data in a different format (CSV, XML, KML) and with diverse internal structures, but all of them must satisfy the constraints of a domain model. In many cases, sources offer open transport data as CSV files by following GTFS. Those open data files can be processed generically, because they have the same structure as that shown in [21]. With regard to the sources without a GTFS structure, it is necessary to process each one of them in a specific way in order to seek the information of interest, which is specified in the domain model, and taking the particular structure of each source into account. We process sources of both types by means of Java and Python programmes in order to extract the specific data required for our purpose. The main reason for using Java was initially that we had more experience with this language, and also owing to its expressive power. We have since used Python more frequently, essentially owing to its readability, simplicity [45] and the availability of libraries. Finally, we convert them into a structured data file with a common format (usually JSON and/or CSV, depending on the origin) and send it to the Semantic Subsystem. C. SEMANTIC SUBSYSTEM The Semantic (SEM) subsystem is responsible for processing structured data files from the ODA and Smart Data (SMD) The SEM subsystem applies an ontological schema, denominated as the MAnto schema, which is related to the public transport infrastructure and the accessibility feature domain. The definition of the MAnto schema is based on the Transmodel (European Reference Data Model for Public Transport Information) [76] and IFOPT (Identification of Fixed Objects in Public Transport) [45] reference data models. Transmodel describes a model of both public transport concepts and data structures related to the different kinds of public transport. IFOPT extends it by including specific structures designed to specify accessibility data concerning the equipment of vehicles, stops and access areas in order to define a model for the principal so-called fixed objects, i.e. elements related to the access to public transport (e.g., entrances, stop places, connection links). We have, therefore, obtained a set of metadata (MAntoterminology) with which to semantically annotate the public transport infrastructure and its accessibility elements data from sources [21]. As mentioned in the previous subsection, data from the different sources are organised and related according to an underlying conceptual model, which we have defined as the domain model. Our data are, therefore, always domain objects and are related in the same way, that is, by following the relationships described in that model. The ontological schema, denominated as the MAnto schema, is also based on the same domain model. It represents data in that context, i.e. in that domain. The MAnto vocabulary (a set of terms) consequently also represents the domain objects, and the relationships between terms are additionally contemplated in that reference model, again our domain model. Fig.4 shows how the MAnto ontology schema is defined following the structure of the domain model in the transport context. VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access FIGURE 4. The definition of MAnto Ontology Schema Fig. 4 shows only a fragment of the domain model in (A) and a fragment of the MAnto ontology schema in (B). We depict how an object in the domain model, denominated as oD-n, is defined as a class in the MAnto ontology schema. For example, the Public Transport object in (A) is defined as the http://com.vortic3.MANTO#PublicTransport class in (B). Similarly, a relationship between two objects in the domain model, denominated as rD-x, is defined as a data property in the MAnto ontology schema. For example, in (A), the relationship between the Public Transport and the Line object makes it possible to establish which lines belonging to a means of Public Transport (Metro Madrid, the London Underground, etc.) are defined as the http://com.vortic3.MANTO#TransportFor data property in (B). It also specifies that this property domain is the http://com.vortic3.MANTO#Line class, and its range is the http://com.vortic3.MANTO#PublicTransport class. As defined in [80], all data sources in the public transport context are specified according to the same underlying domain model. As our approach uses the same domain model to identify the objects from data sources and to define the MAnto ontology schema, it is easy to deduce which terms from the MAnto ontology are mapped onto the existing objects in the data sources. In fact, in the SEM subsystem, we work with the data file generated from the OAD subsystem. Once again, the data from that file also represent the same objects from the domain model. Moreover, we can use the MAnto ontology to define a set of consistent mappings with which to semantically annotate the data from the structured data file generated by the OAD subsystem. An example of a semantically annotated data fragment is shown in Fig.5. mao:line 1_4 a mao:line ; mao:sequence [ a ; mao:par_4_295 ; mao:par_4_294 ; mao:par_4_293 ; mao:par_4_27 ; ....... ] ; mao:transportFor "Metro" ; sch:description "Pinar de Chamartín-Valdecaros" ; sch:name "Line 1" . FIGURE 5. Data annotated by means of MAnto Ontology In this figure, it will be noted that the subway has a line (sch:name “Line 1”) that is internally coded as line 1_4, and which is composed of a set of stations (par_4_295, par_4_294, par_4_29 ) ordered as a sequence. At the end of the process, these data will be stored in the semantic Jena repository, in the public transport & accessibility collection, as shown in Fig.3. Data from this collection can be downloaded at any moment from http://coruscant.my.to:8080/download/metro.xml. The available data is now growing steadily, as this information is increasingly more valuable to users. In this respect, it might be necessary to change the ontologies in order to adapt to this growth if the domain model evolves. In VOLUME XX, 2017 9 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access fact, MAnto is a ‘living ontology’, that is, it can be expanded through the use of an iterative and incremental process [39], thus making it possible to semantically annotate new data that could appear over time. The SEM subsystem similarly includes other ontological schema related to incidents (i.e. changes in the working state) of the accessibility elements in the public transport network, which could occur at any time (more information is provided in [16]). Incident data, which are obtained from the Smart Data subsystem, have to be semantically annotated and then stored in the Jena repository, in the incidents collection, as shown in Fig. 3. In this case, we have defined a set of mapping rules with which to automatically transform data from the SMD subsystem into RDF graphs by means of RML. Sample data from the incidents collection can be downloaded from http://coruscant.my.to:8080/download/events.xml. D. SMART DATA SUBSYSTEM The Smart Data (SMD) subsystem employs crowdsourcing techniques [21] to proce...
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Running head: URBAN MOBILITY IMPROVEMENT
1

Urban Mobility Improvement
Name of Student
Institution

URBAN MOBILITY IMPROVEMENT
2
Improving Urban Mobility
The authors are proposing a data integration platform with the architecture to combine
data from different sources and produce the data in various ways to the users'users' convenience.
In any urban center, the most within the city play a significant citizens' welfare. Being able to
freely and quickly move around the town determines people's concentration, the interactions
between people, and their perception of the environment (Ca'ceresCa'ceres et al., 2017). By
finding a way of handling the challenges that are likely to occur, both short-term and long-term
effects are minimized. Short-term effects include irritation, anger, and lateness. Long-term
effects are like the consequences of an ambulance carrying a patient in need of immediate
medical care delayed in a traffic jam.
Ca'ceresCa'ceres et al. propose an architecture called Services on the Move Architecture,
abbreviated as SoMA. This architecture performs data integration functions; it collects data from
different sources and is in other formats, and data collected by various smart devices. It
combines the data, reconciles, and harmonizes the differences between the data. This particular
platform has been designed to help in urban mobility by improving the efficiency of public
transport.
In their project,the authors used various technologies. Web-scraping is obtaining data
from the internet. The challenge is that this data is often in different formats and written in other
programming languages. This is done automatically using programs that, upon retrieving the
data, store it for future use. Semantic technology refers to the technologies used to help machines
understand data. The technologies used in this project are the Resource Description Frame and
SPARQL. The data processing technology works on the data to change it into the required
format. These include ApacheNiFi and MongoDB. So they used already existing technology

URBAN MOBILITY IMPROVEMENT
3
while creating their platform to contain data from various sources, convert it to a machineunderstandable form, and process it.
As mentioned above, SoMA carries out its functionalities in three distinct processes;
acquisition, processing, and data integration. This data is then integrated with one obtained from
open sources, the public, and crowdsourcing. Since the project's main aim is to develop a way of
increasing urban mobility, the data gathered concerns public transport. This is made possible by
the Open Data &Acquisition sub-system. The increased and frequent rate at which the software
is used by the general causes the data to increase.
The validation of SoMA can be viewed in two main perspectives; data integration, a
global and specific interpretation where it can be specialized by the user so that the routes, events
on the roads, accidents on the road, and other information provided are specific to them. The
platform is made of applications. Notify.me, which is used to provide information about bus
routes, MMAppcessible that gathers information on the mobility of transport routes with
emphasis to the impaired and the blind. MMA4A is the third application, and it has the features
for collecting the information on incidences on the path requested. AccessPedRo is made for
pedestrians as it has the pedestrian routes in the city on a map.
Each application in the web suite plays an essential role in helping the user to navigate traffic.
By having the information on which routes have accidents, where the traffic jam is, and even the
roads designated for pedestrians, people can achieve mobility. Furthermore, the impaired are
included in these developments. The apps have voice recognition for the blind to use; those using
wheelchairs can obtain information on which parking places are suitable. To achieve urban
mobility, all occupants are to be considered and catered for. Using the data integration features

URBAN MOBILITY IMPROVEMENT
4
makes the process and information valuable and more reliable. This is because the data is
obtained from many sources hence is not prejudiced.

URBAN MOBILITY IMPROVEMENT
5
References
Cáceres, P et al. (2017). Improving Urban Mobility by Defining a Smart Data Integration
Platform. Retrieved from https://dx.doi.10.1109/ACCESS.2017


Running head: VISIONS OF THE DIGITAL CITY

Visions of the Digital City
Name of student
Institution

1

VISIONS OF THE DIGITAL CITY
Visions of the Digital City
The author's primary purpose is to prove that the success of the implementation of
projects to build smart cities relies on more factors other than technology. For cities to reach this
digital level, they will depend on social, philosophical, political, economic, and cultural factors
and technology (Aurigi, 2005). Implementation of one aspect will not be useful as a city is a sum
of all the above factors. All should be considered and integrated for the digital city to succeed.
The success of the digital city is determined by how the ...


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