What are the problems in building a smart city? How to solve them?

The 2019 Big Data Innovation Application and Digital China Construction and Development Conference is being held in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. At the conference, "smart city construction" was the most frequently mentioned keyword by national ministries and experts attending the conference.

Throughout the world, the construction of smart cities must go through three stages: digitalization, networking, and intelligence. At present, my country is in a critical period of moving from networking to intelligence, that is, the construction period of a true "smart city".

There is no doubt that big data is the fundamental basis for the construction of smart cities. How to understand the relationship between big data and smart city construction and how to make good use of big data in the construction process have become key issues in the construction of smart cities.

Big data should have "time and space" attributes

"To give a simple example, stampedes occur from time to time all over the world. Stampedes are essentially caused by our poor control over space and time. There needs to be detailed records of how big the space is and how many people entered at what time. Such records are essentially a matter of time and space." Wang Jiayao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the Military Key Laboratory of Surveying, Mapping and Navigation Engineering, introduced the concept of "space-time big data".

Wang Jiayao believes that in the process of smart city construction, only by considering big data in time and space can its value be maximized, that is, to realize the use of "big data based on a unified space-time mechanism, whose activities are directly or indirectly related to the outside world in time and space", so that these data can play a continuous aggregation effect and reveal the essential laws of things.

Wang Jiayao said frankly that there are still many problems in the process of building smart cities in my country, and one of them is the lack of understanding of data as an important basic support for smart cities. He said: "For how to build a spatiotemporal big data platform, we have proposed several models such as spatial information sharing and spatial information operation of network services, spatiotemporal information service technology methods based on cloud computing, and hybrid service technology methods that integrate grids and elastic clouds. These models are a systematic idea to guide us in building a new type of smart city spatiotemporal big data platform today."

Using the "Four Modernizations" model to serve the construction of smart cities

"After long-term thinking and practice, we have proposed a solution to help local governments build smart cities, which can be summarized as the 'four-in-one service model', namely platform-based, modular, verified, and ecological. Practices in many regions have proved that the 'four-in-one' service model should be highly valued in the construction of smart cities." said Yin Hongtao, chairman of the China Smart City Industry and Technology Strategic Alliance.

Yin Hongtao believes that digital cities are big data-based, modular platforms, such as cloud applications and integration, urban digital twins, urban brains, city-level digital asset management platforms, etc. These platforms should be used to support urban innovation and drive the development of urban digital economy .

Smart city construction cannot be separated from the innovation and support of enterprises. In the process of smart city construction, regional investment attraction needs the support of verification service strategies. "In simple terms, it is to create an OpenLab (open laboratory) to allow innovative enterprises to use their hands and feet to realize the targeted application of new technologies, thereby replacing the traditional model of looking for new customers with new technologies." Yin Hongtao said.

Yin Hongtao summarized "building a digital innovation ecosystem and revitalizing urban data" as an ecological service strategy. He said that ecological services are not only the needs of corporate development, but also the needs of the government in building smart cities. Enterprises need to grow and seek partners, new technologies and talents need a good environment to use them, and capital support for innovative and entrepreneurial projects requires a good investment environment. All of this requires an innovative ecological environment based on big data and with advanced features.