Big Data Applications in Smart Cities

A "Smart City" generally means a technologically advanced city, that is able to understand its environment through analyzing its data so that it immediately makes changes to solve issues and to improve the residents' quality of life. The huge volume, high velocity and wide variety of city's data require the utilization of "Big Data" technologies to gain valuable insights from it. This paper reviews the applications and, hence, the potentials where Big Data technology can drive a city to be smart. Starting from investigating the visibility of the city, which means collecting data from all networks, devices and sensors that embedded in its infrastructure. Continuing to explain how can this data become valuable by passing different processing stages, and by applying advanced analyzing Big Data platforms on data. The smartness of the data-driven city is achieved by visualizing the data in useful shape in order to improve any city's system application. The review has also included few real world examples that shows the practical applications of Big Data in a Smart City in the domains of smart energy, smart public safety and smart traffic systems.