Smart City Search: A User Survey

The number of sensors deployed in cities is growing from year to year due to different drivers such as sensors contained in embedded systems, smartphones, weather stations, and sensor networks. When connecting these sensors to the Internet, the state of the city is available online and in real-time, thus, realizing the vision of an Internet of Things (IoT). The combination of this sensor knowledge with data from other sources and services makes cities “smarter” and enables novel applications such as finding free parking spots. A key service for many of those applications is a search engine. This Smart City Search would allow users to search and find entities of the real-world which exhibit a certain state at query time. To inform the design of such a search engine, we conducted a user survey to identify usage patterns and desires of users for Smart City Search.