Local Information and Communication Infrastructures: An Introduction -- Local Information and Communication Infrastructures: An Introduction -- I Digital Cities Around the World: Case Studies -- The Seattle Community Network: Anomaly or Replicable Model? -- The Blacksburg Electronic Village: A Study in Community Computing -- The Life and Death of the Great Amsterdam Digital City -- Urban Cyberspace as a Social Construction: Non-technological Factors in the Shaping of Digital Bristol -- Virtual Helsinki: Enabling the Citizen, Linking the Physical and Virtual -- Digital City Shanghai: Concepts, Foundations, and Current State -- Activities and Technologies in Digital City Kyoto -- World Digital Cities: Beyond Heterogeneity -- II Virtual Community Platforms -- Virtual Cities for Real-World Crisis Management -- Virtuose, a VIRTual CommUnity Open Source Engine for Integrating Civic Networks and Digital Cities -- Talking Digital Cities: Connecting Heterogeneous Digital Cities Via the Universal Mobile Interface -- Town Digitizing: Omnidirectional Image-Based Virtual Space -- III Knowledge and Data Modeling for Digital Cities -- Articulating the Digital Environment Via Community-Generated Ontologies -- Map-Based Range Query Processing for Geographic Web Search Systems -- Recognizing Buildings Using a Mobile System and a Reference City Model -- Querying Multiple Video Streams and Hypermedia Objects of a Video-Based Virtual Space System -- IV Participation, Design, Monitoring -- Cultural User Experience Issues in E-government: Designing for a Multi-cultural Society -- Visualizing Social Patterns in Virtual Environments on a Local and Global Scale -- Participation in Community Systems: Indications for Design -- Intention and Motive in Information-System Design: Toward a Theory and Method for Assessing Users’ Needs -- The Perfections of Sustainability and Imperfections in the Digital Community: Paradoxes of Connection and Disconnection -- V ICT and Social Capital -- The Promises and Perils of Integrated Community Learning Environments -- Effects of ICT on Social Cohesion: The Cyburg Case -- Citizenship and Digital Media Management -- Digital Cities and the Opportunities for Mobilizing the Information Society: Case Studies from Portugal.

Digital cities constitutes a multidisciplinary field of research and development, where researchers, designers and developers of communityware interact and collaborate with social scientists studying the use and effects of these kinds of infrastructures and systems in their local application context. The field is rather young. After the diffusion of ICT in the world of organizations and companies, ICT entered everyday life. And this also influenced ICT research and development. The 1998 Workshop on Communityware and Social Interaction in Kyoto was an early meeting in which this emerging field was discussed. After that, two subsequent Digital Cities workshops were organized in Kyoto, and a third one in Amsterdam. This book is the result of the 3rd Workshop on Digital Cities, which took place September 18–19, 2003 in Amsterdam, in conjunction with the 1st Communities and Technologies Conference. Most of the papers were presented at this workshop, and were revised thoroughly afterwards. Also the case studies of digital cities in Asia, the US, and Europe, included in Part I, were direct offsprings of the Digital Cities Workshops. Together the papers in this volume give an interesting state-of-the-art overview of the field. In total 54 authors from the Americas, from Asia, and from Europe were contributed to this volume. The authors come from Brazil (two), the USA (eleven), China (three), Japan (fourteen), Finland (two), Germany (two), Italy (three), Portugal (two), the Netherlands (eight), and the UK (seven), indicating the international nature of the research field.