Tourist vehicles and boats are equipped with the GNSS navigation system, enabling “smart ride-hailing within the scenic area.”

“Urban development cannot be separated from three-dimensional space and time. Spatiotemporal information serves as the best reference and the most reliable record of urban growth.” Li Weisen, Deputy Director of the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation, offered a professional “science‑based explanation” of what he sees as a smart city.

A smart city, underpinned by spatiotemporal information and leveraging modern information technologies such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing, embeds human‑generated data into urban construction, management, operations, services, and development, thereby achieving intelligent functioning that either operates independently of human intervention or requires minimal human oversight.

Li Weisen believes that smart city development should proceed along three key axes: first, the construction of infrastructure in areas such as hardware, networking, and data transmission; second, the establishment of spatiotemporal information infrastructure; and third, the advancement of intelligent technologies across all sectors and industries.

From digital cities to smart cities, the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation is currently prioritizing work in four key areas: first, enriching data—by significantly expanding the diversity of data sources; second, incorporating a temporal dimension; third, advancing technological approaches; and fourth, enhancing the level of intelligence. Li Weisen argues that, whether it involves informatization or intelligentization, social geospatial information must come first and serve as the foundational pillar for smart city development.

In the concrete process of building smart cities, whether a unified set of indicators is needed remains a subject of ongoing debate and exploration. However, a top-level standardization framework for smart cities is indispensable during the early stages of development and deployment.

Yin Minghan, Chief Engineer of the National Standardization Administration, stated: “Standardization for smart cities is the fundamental guarantee for their orderly and healthy development; it is an essential prerequisite for fostering the aggregation, sharing, and effective utilization of urban information resources, and it also serves as a crucial support for the successful application of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data, and mobile internet in smart city construction.”

Explaining the necessity of standardization, Yin Minghan stated: “The architecture of a smart city is what is known as a ‘system of systems,’ encompassing numerous domains such as information technology, remote sensing, communications, urban management, and planning. It is a complex systems engineering endeavor, and standardization efforts must effectively leverage and integrate the existing standardization frameworks across these fields.”

In the course of implementation, the National Standardization Administration has undertaken the following measures: establishing a cross‑sectoral and inter‑departmental platform for standardization collaboration; setting up a General Coordination and Promotion Group and an Expert Advisory Group for smart city standardization; and, from three perspectives—expert consultation and policy recommendations, standard coordination, and division of responsibilities for standard development—advancing related work in a coordinated manner, with phased implementation, in accordance with the overall plan.

Current progress indicates that, in 2013, the National Standardization Administration issued an ideal plan for five urban national standards, covering foundational standards such as smart city technologies, reference models, evaluation frameworks, a performance‑evaluation system for equipment, and guidelines for SOA applications.