The term Digital Community or Digital City (Smart Community, information city and e-city are also used) refers to a connected community that combines broadband

Broadband

The term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal or device of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal or device . Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times...

 communications infrastructure; flexible, service-oriented computing infrastructure

Service Oriented Infrastructure

Service Oriented Infrastructure or SOI provides a system for describing information technology infrastructure as a service. The underlying principles go back to, among others, Mainframe and LDAP technologies; SOI provides a framework or mindset for making business benefits measurable.- Overview :A...

 based on open industry standards; and innovative services to meet the needs of governments and their employees, citizens and businesses. The geographical dimension (space) of digital communities vary: they can be extended from a city district up to a multi-million metropolis.

While wireless infrastructure is a key element of Digital City infrastructure, it is only a first step. The Digital City may require hard-wired broadband infrastructure, and it is much more than just the network. A Digital City provides interoperable, Internet-based government services that enable ubiquitous

Ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems...

 connectivity to transform key government

Government

Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...

 processes, both internally across departments and employees and externally to citizens and businesses. Digital City services are accessible through wireless mobile devices and are enabled by services oriented enterprise architecture

Service-oriented architecture

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...

 including Web services, the Extensible Markup Language (XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

), and mobilized software applications.

Research on digital cities is conducted by many organizations, including the MIT Smart Cities Lab; the World Foundation for Smart Communities; URENIO

URENIO

The URBAN AND REGIONAL INNOVATION Research Unit is a University Lab in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, School of Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. URENIO is a non-profit research organization that started its operation in 1995...

 research unit and the Lab for Global Information Networks, Unicamp.