Managing COVID-19-related knowledge: A smart cities perspective

Abstract

Effective management of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the urgent need to improve epidemic prevention require rapid response and immediate solutions, deploying appropriate knowledge management procedures and facilitating effective decision-making and managerial efforts. The increased adoption of smart cities (SC) technologies offers various technologies that can support knowledge capturing, acquisition, sharing, and transferring. However, knowledge management practitioners and decision-makers face various challenges to manage huge data generated from the various SC platforms. Managing COVID-19-related knowledge necessitates filtering, cleaning, keeping, and sharing only useful data. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate managing knowledge related to COVID-19 from a SC perspective. The methodological approach for this study is a systematic literature review. The findings indicate that SC technologies, through the advanced deployment of information communications technology (ICT) applications, have a crucial role in knowledge capturing and sharing. Smart cities strategies enable knowledge extraction through facilitating data collection and analysis over various disparate databases, as well as facilitating quick and accurate handling and analysis of huge and unpredicted amount of data. Managing knowledge related to COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to improve the planning, treatment and controlling the pandemic, enhance decision-making, and enable disaster management. However, the managing of a huge amount of complex, unstructured data and information remains a big challenge for COVID-19 knowledge management (KM) initiatives. The paper proposes a conceptual model and illustrates the various components and links between SC strategies, KM and COVID-19, and how this can inform, facilitate, and enhance decision-making to take steps for the path of recovery.