Abstract

Development of smart cities has become a national strategy for effectively tackling the challenges in current dynamic digital environment. The rapid development of smart cities leads to the production and accumulation of a huge amount of data usually referred as big data. The challenge is the accumulated data from different sources are often isolated in different information systems. It is usually very difficult or impossible to effectively and efficiently access such data from an integrated manner. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for effectively integrating and managing big data, especially in the rapid development of smart cities in China. Nevertheless, and despite a number of data integration approaches found in the literature, there is a clear lack of appropriate approach from both social construction and technological construction for the effective integration of big data sources. Moreover, there is a theoretical gap in existing integration of big data sources for explaining the multiverse of data integration in world of practice. This issue of applicability of approach is now recognised as one of the fundamental key issues in developing smart cities. This study aims at providing insights in this area, and presents a comprehensive analysis of existing studies on the integration of big data resources for the development of smart cities in China. The study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a mix-methods strategy consisting of literature review, document analysis and case studies. The findings of this research state that the identification of four challenges in data integration and five data governance problems in the development of smart cities. To effectively tackle such challenges and adequately address these problems, a digital continuity approach, a holistic approach, is proposed to managing big data resources that data can be tracked, traced, linked and exploited for the development of smart cities in China. The proposed approach also can be used to guide the development of strategies, policies, and action plans for integrating big data resources to improve data assurance, data integrity, data trust, data security and data reusability in the delivery of smart city services in China.

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