Towards the construction of smart city index for analytics (SM-CIA): Pilot-testing with major cities in China using publicly available data

The smart city concept is becoming increasingly important in recent years, but no universally agreed index has been developed to assess smartness in urban cities. This study proposed the construction of an index, we call Smart City Index for Analytics (SM-CIA), to objectively measure the degree of smartness in urban cities in six domain areas. We then conducted a pilot testing of SM-CIA on major cities in China. Publicly available data were collected from 2008 to 2012 and time trend analysis was conducted to detect changes of the cities in various smart city domains. A significant increasing trend was found in smart living, mobility, economy and governance domains. Cross-sectional analysis was conducted to rank the cities. The top three cities were Xiamen, Shenzhen and Shanghai. To validate the proposed index, the findings were compared with the Lien Public Service Excellence Index, one of the recent indices developed for China's cities. The results suggested that the cities' scores based on our proposed SM-CIA were correlated with the business perspective of Lien's Index, but not with the citizen's perspective. This is on-going work towards the construction of a global smart city index.