This is the 8th edition of the workshop series labeled "AW4City - Web Applications and Smart Cities", which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held virtually in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The workshop series aims to investigate the Web and Web applications' role in establishing smart city (SC) promises. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in SC growth. This year, the workshop focuses on the role of the web in smart environment. In the era of cities and under the UN 2030 Agenda and the European Green deal for sustainable growth, cities appear to play crucial role in securing humanity against environmental threats and generate sustainable and circular cities. In this regard, cities attempt to improve their forms (e.g., more compact, and eco-friendlier) and performance to become friendlier and able to host their increasing populations. Additionally, new types of business appear (e.g., that utilize IoT and data, manage e-waste and recycle), while the co-existence of autonomous things and people generate another challenge that cities have been started phasing. This workshop aims to demonstrate how web applications, Apps and Web Intelligence can serve smart environment in general. @en

This is the 9th edition of the workshop series labeled "AW4City - Web Applications and Smart Cities", which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held virtually in Lyon, France. The workshop series aims to investigate the Web and Web applications' role in establishing smart city (SC) promises. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in SC growth. This year, the workshop focuses on the role of the web in social coherence. cities appear to play a crucial role in securing humanity against social threats and generating sustainable and circular cities. In this regard, cities attempt to secure social sustainability and coherence (e.g., deal with affordable energy, poverty, hunger, equal opportunities in education, jobs, and health, etc.) and enhance their performance to become friendlier and able to host their increasing populations. Additionally, new types of business appear (e.g., for smart energy), while the co-existence of autonomous things and people generate another challenge that cities have started phasing. This workshop aims to demonstrate how web applications Apps can Web intelligence serve communities. @en

This is the 10th edition of the workshop series labeled “AW4City – Web Applications and Smart Cities”, which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held in Austin, Texas. The workshop series aims to investigate the Web and Web applications’ role in establishing smart city (SC) promises. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in SC growth. This year, the workshop focuses on the new era of the Web and web intelligence in cities and communities. In the era of digital twinning and metaverse (so-called citiverse for cities), and under the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable growth, cities are being transformed into virtual spaces that generate new types of value and new experiences to their citizens and enterprises that can enhance living and offer new opportunities for economic growth. Moreover, AI and web intelligence generate new types of automated transactions in these virtual spaces, while they can utilize data spaces and standardization for optimal data flow. This workshop aims to demonstrate how the Web transforms cities into new virtual environments.@en

This article introduces a business model for big and open linked data in smart and circular cities, laying the foundation of a new approach that generates societal, business, and public value.@en

City digital transformation is being performed across the globe and it is being supported by several initiatives and policy groups. Nevertheless, this transformation is mainly technology oriented. Although there have been several interesting and impactful outcomes, like solutions for enhancing municipal efficiency and local living, the results lag behind expectations. Real transformation should also change structures and address the whole range from social to technical aspects. People-centricity in this transformation is an emerging topic that is attracting attention and some initiatives have launched. People-centric transformation can be defined as a multi-stakeholder approach to digital transformation that realizes sustainability, inclusiveness, prosperity, and human rights for the benefit of all. The aim of this special issue is to better understand all aspects of citizen centricity and how it can change the orientation of city digital transformation process. The special issue highlights the main elements of people-centricity in cities: inclusiveness, openness, engagement and empowerment via securing citizen awareness, data privacy, service simplification and transparency, and technological availability and observability. @en

Smart services concern the core element of a smart city, since they support the realization of urban "intelligence" in terms of people, economy, governance, environment, mobility and leaving. Smart services aim to enhance quality of life within a city and in this respect to improve "livability". The types and purposes of smart services cannot be easily pre-defined, since they are the outcome of innovation, which cannot be pre-defined either, but instead it is the product of citizens' and businesses' creativity. However, standard bodies that work on smart city definition have described smart city portfolios, which are suggested to city policy makers and potential entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to validate whether standardized smart service portfolios are being followed by smart cities in practice. In this regard, a set of more than 70 smart cities are examined and their smart services are matched to these portfolios. The outcomes are extremely important and leave space for future research in this regard.@en

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.@en

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.@en