Visualization in Smart City Technologies

Smart cities aim to use technology to connect people with information to make evidence-based decisions, use resources more efficiently, improve citizens' quality of life, and make cities more sustainable. Smart cities generate massive amounts of data due to a large number of embedded technology; although useful to achieve the city goals, these data are complex for people to manage. Data visualization is an efficient means to represent urban data and help people to understand the underlying information, uncover hidden patterns in data sets, and generate insights that support decision-making. This paper presents an overview of the usage of data visualization in smart city technologies, identifies the technologies used to visualize information, analyzes the visualization techniques, and offers an overview of the biggest challenges and future directions of visualization in smart cities systems.