ICT is becoming increasingly pervasive to urban environments and providing the necessary basis for sustainability and resilience of the smart future cities. Often ICT tools for a smart city deal with different application domains e.g. land use, transport, energy, and rarely provide an integrated information perspective to deal with sustainability and socioeconomic growth of the city. Smart cities can benefit from such information using Big, and often real-time cross-thematic, data collection, processing, integration and sharing through inter-operable services deployed in a Cloud environment. However, such information utilisation requires appropriate software tools, services and technologies to collect, store, analyse and visualise large amounts of data from the city environment, citizens and various departments and agencies at city scale. This paper presents a theoretical perspective on the smart cities focused Big data processing and analysis by proposing a Cloud-based analysis service that can be further developed to generate information intelligence and support decision-making in smart future cities context.

With the emergence of new methodologies and technologies it has now become possible to manage large amounts of environmental sensing data and apply new integrated computing models to acquire information intelligence. This paper advocates the application of cloud technologies to support the information, communication and decision making needs of a wide variety of stakeholders in the complex business of the management of urban and regional development. The complexity is evident in the socio-economic and environmental interactions and impacts embodied in the concept of the urban-ecosystem. This highlights the need for more effective integrated environmental management systems. A key to understanding the nature of integrated environmental management systems is the identification of the need for horizontal integration of information across sectoral inter-agency boundaries at the local level, and the need for vertical coordination between levels of governance. This paper offers a user-oriented approach to the specification of requirements for the effective management of urban areas and the potential contributions that can be supported by cloud computing. The commonality of the influence of the drivers of change at the urban level offers the opportunity for the cloud computing community to develop generic solutions that can serve the needs of hundreds of cities throughout Europe and indeed globally. In this respect, different cloud based architecture scenarios are presented which utilise capabilities compliant to various standards in generating information and intelligence for urban governance.

With continuous increase in urban population, the need to plan and implement smart cities based solutions for better urban governance is becoming more evident. These solutions are driven, on the one hand, by innovations in ICT and, on the other hand, to increase the capability and capacity of cities to mitigate environmental, social inclusion, economic growth and sustainable development challenges. In this respect, citizens' science or public participation provides a key input for informed and intelligent planning decision and policy making. However, the challenge here is to facilitate public in acquiring the right contextual information in order to be more productive, innovative and be able to make appropriate decisions which impact on their well being, in particular, and economic and environmental sustainability in general. Such a challenge requires contemporary ICT solutions, such as using Cloud computing, capable of storing and processing significant amount of data and produce intelligent contextual information. However, processing and visualising contextual information in a Cloud environment is not straightforward due to user profiling and contextual segregation of data that could be used in different applications of a smart city. In this regard, we present a Cloud-based architecture for context-aware citizen services for smart cities and walkthrough it using a hypothetical case study.