- Introduction and Topic outline
Smart Cities are cities that utilise IoT applications/devices for various tasks in order to improve the efficiency of public services such as; road networks, emergency services, area monitoring/surveillance and public transport (trains/trams/busses). The purpose of this assignment is to undertake research into UK crime statistics and how new IoT technologies have the potential to help lower the number of offences being committed for several of the UK’s most common crimes.
Therefore with the ongoing developments and improvements in IoT technology, how can this be implemented effectively by public authorities, services and corporations while also improving the safety, connectivity, efficiency and security of cities and other urban areas.
Due to the constantly evolving and developing nature of the computer and technology industries, it is crucially important that the majority of information collected has been recently published and covers technology that is currently used or in development for the future rather than outdated software and hardware. For the majority of searches a published date age range was applied so that only the most recent and up to date sources were retrieved by the databases. In some cases it may be appropriate to look at older papers where technology has shown limited advances or the principles have not changed since the publication of the source material.
In addition, for a paper to be considered, it must be deemed relevant under at least one of three defined key research areas: Crime & Statistics, Smart City Technology and Legal/Ethical Issues. Papers where more than one area is covered were considered as highly important due to their greater relevance.
A large number of searches focused on UK specific material however other international material was also assessed as the information could in some cases be applied to UK based scenarios and or the technology was available in the UK.
2.5. Inclusion assessment process
An extensive list of 31 journal articles/conference papers were found during the initial literature search across the Teesside Library Discovery, IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library databases. All papers were evaluated for their relevance to the following categories: Statistics, Smart City Technology and Legal/Ethical Issues. After evaluation the final number of papers was reduced to 22 papers which forms the final list. To highlight areas of relevance to the project topic, each piece of literature has been listed below according to which category they are relevant in a matrix format Oates (2016).
2.6. Exclusion Process
From the initial list of 31 journal papers, 9 papers were discarded from the final list for multiple reasons regarding their relevance to the research aims and topic of the project. Some papers were considered too old to be useful when considering modern technology. Furthermore the majority of the papers selected were published within the last 3 years (2016 to 2019) as these papers have the most up to date information regarding the issues and technologies covered across all the examined papers. Only 4 papers in the final list fall outside this range with the oldest paper being 11 years old (Published in 2008). Some papers were also discarded as there were newer versions of the paper/article from the author making the previous paper obsolete. Some literature also did not contribute any additional information when compared with other papers meaning they were also considered surplus to requirements.
- Conclusion
In conclusion the Literature review can be seen as moderately successful as it provided a substantial list of quality sources across the databases searched. Literature was only included if it met the specified requirements outlined before the search. Due to the nature of the topic chosen for the project, statistical research relating to crime could not be found as this is purely stored and provided by the government and not the research databases. Regardless a large amount of Primary and
secondary research sources were identified which provided a broad spectrum of information regarding potential technologies and their uses in relation to this project (Smart Cities and Crime Reduction).
Across the three databases, numerous individual searches were carried out, using a range of filters and keywords, with some searches being edited and improved for more specialised and relevant results. Some search results also provided additional keywords which were used as alternatives to produce more relevant search results. For example searches for crime statistics led to the discovery of crime data. Due to the emergence of abbreviated and non-abbreviated terms amongst search results (such as for the Internet of Things/IoT). Filters for topics including IoT were applied post search to find papers related to that topic rather than searching for them using additional keywords which could be inaccurate depending on the use of abbreviations.
Some papers found on the search also had a limited number of citations or cited few papers within them meaning they were considered as lower priority material in the final search however due to the limitations of material for some searches, these papers were also considered.
For searches where a large number of sources was returned by the database, results were sorted by relevance and also date published to ensure the most relevant and most recent results were returned at the top of the list.
In some cases where a high quality source was found, an author search was used to find potential extra papers covering similar topics. This was useful as it found a more up to date version of the paper originally found by the search with additional information not found in the original paper
To improve future searches, more planning should be completed to ensure all questions and permutations were identified prior to the search. By providing additional structure to the search, results may have been more accurate and consistent to the topic.
Overall the search was useful at identifying a wide range of technologies which are relevant to the Smart Cities and could be used to help prevent crime despite the lack of crime data produced by the search. - Limitations
One of the key limitations of the search was the lack of academic sources containing or using crime data/statistics meaning the objective to outline a key list of crimes failed. The national office for statistics appears to be the only usable source for this information.
Another limitation is the constant advancement of the computer industry in line with Moore’s Law (Moore, n.d.) where computer power doubles every two years which enables the industry to advance at a rapid rate. Due to these advances, technologies may quickly become obsolete therefore it was important to ensure results were recent.
The final key limitation was the fact the search was restricted to only research papers and conference papers. It is likely that with the inclusion of other material and sources of information (such as the national office for statistics), some crime statistical data could have been found as part of the research. Without the option of extra source types, some key material may have been overlooked and neglected.
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