Smart Regions in the Age of the Citizen Developer: A Service-Oriented Engineering Approach

Gerhard Kormann-Hainzl, Rubén Ruiz-Torrubiano

Abstract: Smart regions are mainly characterized by adopting information technology as a means for improving and enhancing management and economic development at the level of individual villages, cities and regions themselves. This enhancement can be effectively achieved by using smart service systems that focus on value co-creation among all stakeholders. In general, these services have to be engineered in a special way tailored to the particular community and use case at hand. In this paper, we propose an engineering approach centered on the concept of the citizen developer for creating, maintaining and managing those smart services. By using a domain-specific modelling language specially tailored to the smart region context, we develop a platform capable of generating smart services from a high-level description including data sources, transformations and visualizations. This results in an efficient and cost-effective development approach where the stakeholders of the smart region context themselves lead the process of building, deploying and implementing the relevant use-cases for their communities.