Background: In the context of smart cities, public participation and citizen science are key ingredients for informed\nand intelligent planning decisions and policy-making. However, citizens face a practical challenge in formulating\ncoherent information sets from the large volumes of data available to them. These large data volumes materialise due\nto the increased utilisation of information and communication technologies in urban settings and local authorities�\nreliance on such technologies to govern urban settlements efficiently. To encourage effective public participation in\nurban governance of smart cities, the public needs to be facilitated with the right contextual information about the\ncharacteristics and processes of their urban surroundings in order to contribute to the aspects of urban governance\nthat affect them such as socio-economic activities, quality of life, citizens well-being etc. The cities on the other hand\nface challenges in terms of crowd sourcing with quality data collection and standardisation, services inter-operability,\nprovisioning of computational and data storage infrastructure.\nFocus: In this paper, we highlight the issues that give rise to these multi-faceted challenges for citizens and public\nadministrations of smart cities, identify the artefacts and stakeholders involved at both ends of the spectrum\n(data/service producers and consumers) and propose a conceptual framework to address these challenges. Based\nupon this conceptual framework, we present a Cloud-based architecture for context-aware citizen services for smart\ncities and discuss the components of the architecture through a common smart city scenario. A proof of concept\nimplementation of the proposed architecture is also presented and evaluated. The results show the effectiveness of\nthe cloud-based infrastructure for the development of a contextual service for citizens
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