Post on 01-Mar-2023
The implementation model of a Digital City
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The implementation model of a Digital City.
The case study of the Digital City of Trikala, Greece: e-Trikala
Leo G. Anthopoulos
Ioannis A. Tsoukalas
Mr. Leo Anthopoulos (E-mail: lanthopo@sch.gr) is a doctoral research student in the
Department of Informatics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. He
obtained his B.Sc. from the same department in 1996. His research is conducted under the
supervision of Professor Ioannis A. Tsoukalas and is focused on e-Government area. He has
worked for many organizations, such as the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Research
Committee (AUTh), the Information Society S.A. (Athens) etc. He is the scientific
coordinator of the “Digital City of Trikala (e-Trikala)” project.
Ioannis A. Tsoukalas (E-mail: tsoukala@csd.auth.gr) is a professor of the Department
of Informatics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). His current research and
scientific interests concern Information Society Technologies, Computer Assisted Education
and modern technological materials. He published over hundred papers in the international
magazines, member of various international scientific and professional associations, gave
numerous invited lectures. He is member of several boards, such as the board of the trustees
Information Society SA.
The implementation model of a Digital City
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The implementation model of a Digital City.
The case study of the Digital City of Trikala, Greece: e-Trikala
Abstract
E-Government is being developed according to Government strategic plans. These
plans constitute a framework for digital public services that will benefit both citizens and
public administration. The Digital City can support e-Government evolution by offering a
global environment for public transactions.
The Digital City’s definition is extended to “the global Information Environment,
focusing on the needs of a city area”. Moreover, the Digital City comprises a new virtual
environment, which administers others –in either the private or public sector– where both
marketing and social aspects must be administered and support public benefit.
In this paper both the contribution of the Digital City to e-Government and the
development methodology of the Digital City of Trikala, Greece (e-Trikala), are presented.
The methodology shows the procedure by which the Digital City forms an e-Government
environment, offering more than administrating services. Furthermore, the methodology can
be considered as a general implementation model for developing similar municipal-area
environments for e-Government. The model adopts participatory design issues, while on the
other hand some relative considerations are analyzed.
Keywords: e-Government, Digital City, municipal environment, virtual organizations, public
services, participatory design.
The implementation model of a Digital City
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Introduction
E-Government has become a priority for most developed countries. Governments
around the world have implemented strategic plans (Federal CIO Council - FEA Working
Group, 2002), (U.S. General Services Administration, 2003), (U.S. Federal Government,
2002), (U.S. Federal Government, 2003), (U.K. Central IT Unit, 2000), (European
Commission, 2002), (Government of Canada, 2001), (German Federal Government, 2003),
(Civil, 2001) in order to achieve the following targets: a) the modernization of public
administration, b) the offering of digital public services and c) the facilitation of social
participation in decision making. Moreover, e-Government strategic plans aim at the
implementation of a citizen-centered public administration, where corruption phenomena and
time-consuming bureaucratic procedures are eliminated.
Strategic plans have set specific targets for e-Government, without having specified
social and Agency needs in detail. This planning leads to contradictory results: some digital
services are offered, profiting both citizens and public administration in time and cost savings
(Cap Gemini Ernst & Young web survey, 2003), but, on the other hand, citizens seem
disappointed with those services (Accenture, 2005), (American Customer Satisfaction Index,
2005), (Horrigan, 2004) and prefer traditional transactions.
The Digital City can be a useful tool for supporting the diffusion of e-Government to
citizens and enterprises. Moreover, the Digital City can collect information from local
activities and offer them for statistical analysis. This procedure can interconnect social needs
with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
In this paper a novel approach to the Digital City is proposed and the development
methodology of the Digital City of Trikala, Greece (e-Trikala) is presented. The methodology
can be regarded as an implementation model for all similar municipal environments, which is
the main purpose of this paper. Moreover, the procedure shows the strategic planning for
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local e-Government, which is extended beyond administration services (e-Administration) to
all possible public services.
In section 2 of this paper, the novel approach to the Digital City is outlined, while in
section 3, the e-Trikala project is set out. In section 4 the development methodology of this
Digital City is analyzed and proposed as a general implementation model, while in section 5,
the innovational character of the methodology implemented in the e-Trikala project is argued
for.
The concept of the Digital City
Different approaches give alternative definitions of the Digital City: digital
environments containing official and unofficial information collected from a small
community (Sairamesh, Lee & Anania, 2004), (Sproull & Patterson, 2004), (Widmayer,
1999) and made available through a unique portal are called “Information Cities”. Moreover,
a network of organizations, social teams and enterprises operating in a city area is defined as
a Digital City (Ishida, 2002).
These definitions of the Digital City are extended to “the global municipal area
information environment, focusing on the needs of a city area”. The environment contains
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions, but is not designed to offer
only digital public services or to create digital communities. The primary targets of the
Digital City are: a) to offer digital means for supporting social needs in all daily transactions;
b) to acclimate the local community to the notion of the Information Society; and c) to collect
official and unofficial information from the local community in order to support sustainable
growth of small societies (Wang & Wu, 2001).
Local needs refer all citizen activities, which can be grouped along the following axes
of precedence (Figure 1):
1. Local economy and employment.
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2. The improvement of everyday life and citizen quality of life, which refer to
administration issues, transportation, health and care services.
3. Education, vocational training and life-long learning.
4. Culture and tourism.
Cities and local communities cover specific areas and differ from each other, due to
geographical, financial and cultural parameters. The individual character of each city creates
unique local needs that must be reflected in each Digital City environment.
Figure 1. Axes of precedence for a local community leading towards the Digital City
The Digital City is proposed to follow the multi-tier architecture (LiQi, 2001), inspired
by information cities (Sairamesh et al., 2004), (Sproull et al., 2004), (Widmayer, 1999),
consisting of layers (Figure 2) that are an extension of previous approaches:
a) Infrastructure layer: consists of hardware and software infrastructures, which are
necessary for the Digital City’s operation: fiber optic Metropolitan Area or wireless
broadband networks, network equipment, intelligent transport system, points of access (such
The implementation model of a Digital City
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as infokiosks), operating software systems, software applications offering statistical analysis,
geospatial information systems etc.
b) Service layer: According to the eGov project (eGov Consortium, 2002), a formal
definition of public services suggests that “independent public services are (the) legally
grounded business of public organizations in an economical (sic) sense”. They represent the
development and delivery of products and services of an organized unit to the public. Digital
Cities realize life events and situations according to special cases occurring in the city area.
Moreover, digital services are developed to cover individual and public needs, offer public
information and present the “Human Face” of Administration in the local community. The
Service Layer is the most critical issue of the Digital City since it provides a framework for
communication between citizens and organizations of the Public and the Private Sector, and it
is related to the diffusion of digital activities to the community. Additionally, the Service
Layer contains the applications that are used for decision making by the senior administrators
supervising the design offering execution of the digital services.
c) Users and back-office layer: comprised of a) the end-users, who are different,
unique users or teams of users – such as citizens, students, local enterprises – transacting with
and being served by the Digital City and b) the servants who are the civil servants, public
Agencies and enterprises who offer both e-Government and e-Commerce services. Users
access the Service Layer using various means, both physical (Offices for Public Access, such
as the KEP offices, www.kep.gov.gr) and digital (handheld devices, PCs, info kiosks etc.).
d) Information layer: This contains the information that is produced and stored in the
infrastructure layer. The following categories of information belong to this layer:
1. Public Documents which are produced by the public Agencies and can be offered to
the end users. Public documents support transparency and Democracy in the Digital City.
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2. Confidential or classified public documents that contain information produced by
public Agencies, and whose content can be shared by specific users. Such documents are kept
in Agencies and contain confidential, sensitive information, protected by the relative legal
framework.
3. Private documents refer to documents created in the private sector and personal
documents, which belong to specific end-users. Those documents are not publishable or can
be shared only with the owners’ consent.
4. Permanent records refer to the description of the public services and to the execution
parameters of public transactions, such as users’ personal data, the legal framework,
information of the public Agencies etc. These records are hosted in the infrastructure layer,
and they belong to specific Agencies who are responsible for their security and use.
5. Temporary records and data created during public transactions: this is “pseudo-
information” (such as the identities of the civil servants who executed a public service for
instance) which may or may not have value (temporary records which are suppressed by the
end of a service). Temporary records contain “sensitive” information, such as versioning and
ownership data.
6. Semantics, describing official information of the Digital City and meta-data used for
digital transactions between different ICT systems. These semantics are useful for multiple
operations over information, such as searching and exchanging procedures, but also for
interoperability options. Semantics follow specific schemas, such as the ebXML (U.S.
Federal Government, 2002), GovML (eGov, 2002) and eGIF (U.K. Crown, 2000).
7. Geospatial data refers to information stored over digital maps of the city area.
Geospatial data can add value to the Digital City, since it can simulate the real city
environment and support the development of intelligent applications for public use.
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Geospatial information systems can support intelligent transport, disaster management
phenomena, power and water supply networks and culture and tourism applications.
The development of a Digital City can be supervised by the local public administration.
Municipalities are always “close” to the local community, being aware of local needs and
planning for their confrontation. This procedure is called “top-down”, since the responsible
authority plans projects for the Agencies and end-users who administers.
On the other hand, a local community is a dynamic evolving environment whose needs
are not specific and vary according to multiple parameters. Moreover, local needs usually
have not been associated with ICT solutions or simulated by ICT applications. The effort
made for the ICT to contribute to the manipulation of local needs leads to a new environment
in which ICT participate in everyday life. Local needs are dynamically transformed in this
new environment – the Digital City – and new ones arise.
Figure 2. The multi-layer structure of the Digital City
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The acknowledgement of the transaction between the local community and the Digital
City, forces the “bottom-up” design of this new environment. The bottom-up design refers to
the dynamic involvement of the end-users in the participatory design of the applications and
the digital services.
The reactions from citizens and organized groups of citizens in the Digital City of
Trikala (e-Trikala) project show that public administration has to predict, supervise and
conform to end-users’ retroactions.
The Digital City of Trikala project
According to the previously given definition, the Digital City of Trikala (e-Trikala)
(Anthopoulos, 2005) is the set of ICT infrastructures and applications, which focus on the
special needs of the city of Trikala, central Greece. This project is based in the “top-down”
design, and is being developed under the responsibility of the Municipality of Trikala. The
Municipality formed a group of experts to design the project, discover funding sources, and
supervise its implementation while monitoring the response of the local community.
Moreover, the group of experts has involved social representatives and different groups of
citizens (students, civil servants, individuals etc.) into the discovery of local needs and into
the participatory design of e-Trikala’s targets. The participating procedure will be iterative, in
order for the participants to evaluate and improve the results of the project and moreover to
diffuse these results to the local community.
E-Trikala’s implementation procedure consists of the following sequential phases: 1)
design, 2) implementation and supervision and 3) maintenance and growth. The first phase
has been completed; it was conducted under the responsibility of the group of experts invited
by the Municipality of Trikala, in cooperation with representatives of organized teams of
citizens. Some local needs, together with the reasons behind them, were investigated, specific
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ICT-based solutions that could support these needs were designed, the interconnection of all
ICT-based solutions amongst each other and with the traditional city’s environment
(Einmann & Paradiso, 2004) was planned, and a viability study for the whole project was
developed under this phase. Citizens were invited to express their feelings about local needs
and their expectations from the Digital City. The design phase resulted to a set of unique
ICT-based projects (more information about them is provided by Anthopoulos (2005)), which
will compose the Digital City’s environment.
The project is under the implementation phase running with the supervision of the
group of experts and of the Municipality of Trikala. Primary infrastructures and initial digital
services will be set up before the end of 2005, while the whole project will be completed by
the end of 2006. The implementation phase contains tendering procedures and the
supervision of the achievement of specific milestones, which were set during the design
phase. Milestones will be evaluated by the supervisors, in cooperation with social
representatives and teams of citizens.
The maintenance and growth final phase refers to the operation and extension of the
Digital City. Although the viability study has already been implemented, the operation of the
Digital City in the traditional environment has to be optimized and all social reactions have to
be examined. The final phase will start by the end of the project, it will involve the group of
experts, the final users (public organizations, enterprises (SMEs), unique users, teams of
users) and it will be continuous. The participants of this phase will look for methods of
improvement of the digital environment (such as the improvement of digital services, of user
interfaces etc.), the management of the produced content (such as the selection of necessary
information, the motivation of citizens to create personal content etc.) and for the growth of
the project (such as the extension of the involved users, the extension of the fiber optic
network etc.). Moreover, under this final phase, statistical methods will be applied over
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official information, collected from the Digital City, evaluated by groups of experts and
discussed with the public, in order for the sustainable growth of the city to be achieved.
E-Trikala’s projects refer to all four levels of the Digital City architecture (Figure 3):
1. Infrastructure projects refer to the primary ICT infrastructures, which are
necessary for the operation of the Digital City. These projects consist of the development of
broadband networks in the city area (a fibre optic Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and a
wireless mesh network), of the installation of public servers and access points (intelligent bus
stations, info-kiosks, help desks, wireless hotspots in public buildings, a local network for
public use located in the Municipal Library and centres for tele-workers) which host the
applications and offer digital services.
2. Digital public service projects consist of e-Government and e-commerce projects.
These projects aim at a) the deployment of one-stop digital services, b) the development of a
groupware application, through which civil servants cooperate for the execution of non-
automated public services, and c) the deployment of non-profit digital services and
applications, such as tele-care, distance learning, civil protection.
3. Projects for the management, secure and exchange of public information: These
projects investigate the optimal “production and execution line” of the digital services, in
order for the individual property rights and ownership issues of the information to be secured.
Moreover, research on the security levels of the information (production, access, hosting and
exchange levels) is carried out. Additionally, interoperability issues are investigated, so that
the Digital City’s infrastructures can transact with legacy systems already installed in the
local public and private sector.
4. Projects aiming in the composition of a “critical mass” of end-users: The Digital
City’s success will be based on acceptance by the end-users, who will be aware of the
project’s targets and who will apply for digital services. Some of this category’s projects are:
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vocational training courses; projects for the informing of the end users on ICT issues, such as
broadband networks; and projects which promote volunteerism (similar to NetDay).
Moreover, projects which develop public points of access work in the same direction. It is
estimated that the “critical mass” of end-users will facilitate the “closing” of the digital divide
in the local society. An additional factor which will contribute to the confronting of the
digital divide is the “nature” of the Digital City: its infrastructures are addressed to specific
teams of citizens, who live in a specific area, where training and information activities can
easily be applied.
Figure 3. The multi-tier architecture of the Digital City of Trikala (e-Trikala). The upper and
lower levels represent the user layer.
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The novel definition and the digital public services presented above, indicate that the
Digital City comprises a global e-Government environment where digital services are
extended beyond administration purposes to non-profit services (such as care and training),
but also to services which support development management (such as the “closing” of digital
divide, cultural and trade growth etc.). For this reason, the Digital City comprises a novel e-
Government environment where e-Government is extended beyond e-Administration and all
kinds of digital services are offered for the common wealth.
The development methodology of the Digital City of Trikala
The development methodology of the e-Trikala project was inspired by that of the web
application (Vidgen, 2002) and consists of the following considerations:
a) Social consideration: The Digital City has to be an “open” environment, accessible
to all citizens and organizations, which will not create new “inequalities” or exclusions. The
installation of the infrastructures for public use and the activities which aim at the “closing”
of the digital divide address these issues. Furthermore, multiple communication channels will
offer the digital services, so that even the elderly and people with special needs will be able to
access them. Moreover, a pilot project will be carried out in order for teams of civil servants
to be able to cooperate over a groupware application (Anthopoulos & Tsoukalas, 2005) and
execute complex public services, thus optimising “migration” from traditional to digital
transactions.
b) Technological consideration: Some major priorities were set for the ICT
infrastructures:
1) Use of standardized infrastructures: the reliability of the infrastructures will be
critical to the success of the Digital City and social acceptance of the digital environment. For
this reason, the implementation phase of the project will permit only well tested and mature
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technology (Ferguson, Sairamesh & Feldman, 2004) for both software and hardware
infrastructures. It is estimated that by the end of the implementation phase, the Digital City
will have become a field for the testing of pilot technologies and methods.
2) Scalable, mobile and interoperable architecture: The new digital environment has to
be upgraded and extended according to new demands, while on the other hand it has to
cooperate with legacy systems. For these reasons clusters of servers, following Gigabit
Ethernet and Virtual Private Network (VPN) architecture, will be used to host the
applications and services. This architecture will form easily extensible “virtual areas of
digital services” (such as the virtual area for tele-care, the virtual area for intelligent transport
systems), which will offer services through multiple channels. This method will offer
extensive growth abilities to the Digital City and will support the ease of incorporation of
new services. Moreover, the applications deployed will support web service architecture, so
that they can transact with legacy systems according to specific XML standardized schemas.
3) Common user interface: Communication between the end-users and the digital
services will be established via a user interface, common for all applications and easy for use
and training so that citizens will feel that they can transact with the Digital City. It is
proposed that the interface will be based on that of banking terminals (ATM), with which
users are already familiar. Moreover, graphical characteristics will be incorporated for
supporting the end-users’ intuition.
c) Informational consideration: This refers to issues related to the information layer,
such as the production, securing and offering of data. Different ICT systems will produce
new content and update current content. The main targets of this consideration, are presented
below:
1) Content (documents and records) will be structured and exchanged according to
specific XML schemas, followed by all participating organizations.
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2) Semantics will be applied to describe the content and present its ownership. A
conflict between the participating organizations relates to the ownership of the information
produced in the Digital City. Each document and record will be “marked” with meta-data,
which will describe both the owner and the author. Moreover, meta-data will determine
access and use levels of the information. Information will be stored in the infrastructures of
the Digital City, while authentication criteria will describe access permissions, for both
resources and data.
3) The elimination of intermediate certificates for inter-organization transactions:
Traditional transactions produce official documents to certify the execution of a service or a
special condition of an end-user. An end-user provides those certificates – as described by the
legal framework – to the authority responsible for the service execution. In many cases, the
end-user must provide a series of certificates for the execution of a unique service, while in
other cases the end-user applies to an authority for a certificate’s delivery to another Agency.
The elimination of these intermediate certificates is a primary target in the Digital City and
for this purpose all information will be available to the involved authorities for the execution
of Digital Services. An authority A which has to match information belonging to an authority
B, for instance, will have to apply to the Digital City, without having to request this
information from the end-users. The Digital City will act as a trusted third party and will
provide the information to the applicant authority A, while on the other hand will inform
authority B regarding this case.
d) Ethical consideration: Many ethical issues arise – and have to be investigated and
solved – in the Digital City environment. The Digital City will become a new authority,
where information and content referring to many Agencies and end-users will be produced,
stored and exchanged. Ownership and versioning issues will be treated by means presented
above. The ethical issues requiring attention include the following:
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1) The consent of the involved members (organizations and end-users) will be
requested before the execution of procedures which produce, use or offer personal data.
Consent will be requested after a detailed presentation and analysis of the digital procedures,
together with possible risks (such as security violation issues) will be given to all involved
parties.
2) The designation of the Digital City as a trusted third party, recognized by all local
Agencies.
3) The acknowledgement by the end-users of the Agencies that have authorization to
access their sensitive personal data.
4) The denial of access to personal data to technical administrators and senior officers.
5) Security against unauthorized access to all kinds of information available in the
Digital City, even to information which relates to visitor statistical data, kept by portals and
communication channels.
6) The denial of access to individual data to the operator authority of the Digital City.
7) The monitoring and motivation of involvement of all potential end-users in digital
transactions.
8) Privacy. Digital transactions will be categorized as a) official (such as applications
for e-Government or e-Commerce services), which will be stored in certificate form only, and
which will trigger record updates. b) Unofficial (such as video on demand or entertainment
services), which will be logged only in temporary files, and which will be deleted by the end
of the service.
e) Financial consideration: the end-users must benefit from the Digital City, without
being overcharged for its operation. Charges may lead to social reactions and cause damage
to the digital environment. Moreover, the Digital City must not become a profit and non-
social environment generating “techno-phobia”.
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Before a Digital City is developed, a viability study must be performed, mapping all
necessary or available funding resources for the development, operation, management and
extension of the project. In e-Trikala such a study has been performed and has determined the
following: a) The initial funding capital, offered by the “Information Society” framework
program (www.infosoc.gr), which was enough to cover the development expenses of the
project. b) Operational expenses refer to direct payments (such as personnel wages and
telecommunication charges paid to third companies), and indirect expenses (for infrastructure
maintenance, marketing and the extension of the project).
These expenses will be covered by a minimal charge to the involved Agencies and
enterprises in the Digital City of Trikala, while on the other hand the possibility of
cooperation with the private sector for the project’s growth, is under investigation. This
cooperation will not lead to profit, but to social benefit, either in the form of advanced
retributive services, or in the form of competitive charges for digital services. The Digital
City will become a favourable environment of healthy competition, which will benefit end-
users.
The development methodology presented above is applicable to all similar city-area
projects. This analysis contained a set of considerations (social, informational, technological,
ethical and financial) that reflect both social and technical aspects and can become the
implementation model for Digital Cities in all similar municipal environments.
The innovational character of e-Trikala
The concept of the Digital City is not novel. From the early 1990s, various approaches
to digital cities have been proposed: AOL (Ishida, Aurigiri & Yasuoka, 2001) cities refer to
digital environments accessible via the Internet, where users chat and carry out transactions.
On the other hand, the digital cities of Kyoto (Ishida, 2002) and Amsterdam (Lieshout, 2001)
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were virtual environments which aimed at the interconnection of all citizens over the city
area. These environments were sites that simulated the real city area, while interconnection is
based on broadband networks. Moreover, in cities like New York, “mobile city” (New York
City Economic Development Corporation, 2005) environments are being installed where
wireless mesh networks are accessible for a fee or free of charge.
The digital cities of Hull (www.hullcc.gov.uk) and Beijing (Sairamesh et al., 2004) are
close to e-Trikala, since they use broadband networks in order for digital public services to be
offered and citizen everyday life to be improved. However, in Beijing’s case (China Strategy
LtD, 2001), the Digital City focuses on the needs of the 2008 Olympic Games and the
development of digital services relevant to the Games.
The e-Trikala Digital City differs from the other cases presented in the following ways:
a) e-Trikala is a global ICT-based environment aligned to the local community’s needs
and not to specific targets of development.
b) e-Trikala is under implementation in a small city, where the local community is
characterized by low levels of growth and ICT infiltration. All other Digital Cities presented
were based on their trade exploitation by big vendors, while large Academic institutions were
located in the area, supporting digital diffusion. E-Trikala’s success will be totally based on
the involvement of the entire local community in the digital environment.
c) The design of e-Trikala is not totally “top-down”. Though the Municipality was
responsible for the inspiration of the new global environment – since it was aware of local
needs – and aimed at the design of some digital services, the project is strongly
interconnected with the local community. For this purpose, social representatives were
invited to participate in a social dialogue, in order for social considerations to be investigated,
and for all target groups to be informed of the Digital City properties. Moreover, the aim of
the dialogue was the parameterization of the digital environment to social demands and for
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the community’s retroactions to be eliminated. Social dialogue will be periodical and will
occur frequently during the implementation of the Digital City, expressing the “bottom-up”
design of the project. Furthermore, by the end of the project and the beginning of the Digital
City’s operation, social dialogue will be continuous and non-stop, in order for the new social
needs to be “recognized” and “adopted” by the digital environment.
d) e-Trikala will be a novel e-Government environment where intermediate certificates
will be suppressed, while on the other hand all possible public services will be offered. This
new environment could lead to the reinvention of e-Government and its extension beyond e-
Administration to all possible public services. Additionally, the Digital City could evolve into
an “intelligent environment” where even citizen applications for public services could be
suppressed, which means that the Digital City would “predict” citizen needs. Initially, this
“intelligent environment” will collect information from the local community – with the
consent of the involved parties – aiming at the investigation and discovery of methods that
will lead to the sustainable development of the city (Wang et al., 2002).
Figure 4: the field for knowledge sharing and for coordination of virtual teams and
organizations
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e) e-Trikala does not belong to a unique organization. Although the project was
initiated by the Municipality, the resulting environment will be a virtual organization,
consisting of a set of virtual teams (Godart, Saliou & Bignon, 2001). This virtual organization
will get substance, while it will undertake the management of all virtual teams. Moreover,
this organization will become a field for knowledge collection, sharing, statistical analysis
and decision making (Figure 4).
Conclusions
The Digital City is a global ICT-based environment which can be installed over a city
area, in order for local needs to be treated and for everyday life to be improved. The
development of a Digital City has to be based on the investigation of local needs, while it
requires the total involvement of the local community.
The case of the Digital City of Trikala offers its experience from the cooperation
between local Administration and social representatives. E-Trikala differs from other Digital
Cities in presenting the digital environment as a common field for knowledge sharing and
exchange, and, moreover, as a novel e-Government environment that can offer all possible
public services.
The development methodology of e-Trikala consisted of multiple considerations and
the investigation of all possible parameters influencing the digital environment. This
methodology can become the implementation model for all similar city-area digital
environments.
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